Collaborative Departure Queue Management An Example of Airport Collaborative Decision Making in the United States

The management of airport surface operations to provide shared situational awareness and to control taxi times through the use of ‘virtual queues’ has become an important component of Air Traffic Management (ATM) research and development in both Europe and the United States. Airport Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) has been implemented at a number of airports in Europe, and multiple departure metering concepts have now been tested in the US National Airspace System (NAS). This paper provides a review and comparison of the different airport surface departure management concepts, and describes one such concept in detail that has been evaluated operationally in the field in the US, the Collaborative Departure Queue Management (CDQM) concept. CDQM has been developed and evaluated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) under the Surface Trajectory Based Operations (STBO) project. This paper provides a description of the operational field evaluation of CDQM that was conducted in Memphis, Tennessee, during 2009 and 2010. An analysis of the effectiveness, accuracy and benefit of CDQM in managing departure operations during the field evaluation is presented. CDQM was found to provide reduced taxi times, and resultant reduced fuel usage and emissions, while maintaining full use of departure capacity. Keywords-airport surface traffic management; departure queue management; scheduling algorithms; collaborative decision making; equitable rationing of capacity