A Runway Incursion Prevention System (RIPS) was evaluated in a full mission simulation study at the NASA Langley Research center in March 2002. RIPS integrates airborne and groundbased technologies to provide (1) enhanced surface situational awareness to avoid blunders and (2) alerts of runway conflicts in order to prevent runway incidents while also improving operational capability. A series o...

Due to an anticipated increase in air traffic during the next decade, air traffic control in busy airports is one of the main challenges confronting controllers in the near future. Since the runway is often a bottleneck in an airport system, there is great interest in optimizing usage of the runway. Our study first presents a brief review of the aircraft landing problem. A model for the problem...

We are pursuing the detection of runways in aerial images as part of a project to automatically map complex cultural areas such as a major commercial airport complex. This task is much more difficult that appears at first. _ We use a hypothesize and test paradigm. Hypotheses are formed by looking for instances of long rectangular shapes, possibly interrupted by other long rectangles. We use run...

This paper examines the validity of the Erlang distribution for runway service times. It uses high-fidelity surface surveillance data, for the first time, to model the probability distributions of runway service times and departure throughput, and to validate the Erlang service time assumption. The paper proposes several potential approaches to determine departure runway service time distributi...

As the demand for air transportation continues to grow, some flights cannot land at their preferred landing times because the airport is near its runway capacity. Therefore, devising a method for tackling the Aircraft Landing Problem (ALP) in order to optimize the usage of existing runways at airports is the focus of this study. This study, a hybrid Genetic-Cuckoo Search (GCS) algorithm for opt...

Many NextGen technologies and concepts, when implemented, will change the underlying stochastic nature of flight tracks. This paper investigates how changes in the stochastic variability of flight tracks have the potential to impact the probability of potential wake encounters. We investigate these relationships for a single runway and for parallel runways. The results show that the mean and st...

T HE Erlang distribution has been used to model the runway service process in queuing models of air traffic operations [1–3] since its use was first proposed by Hengsbach and Odoni [4]. It has been shown to offer certain computational advantages because it can be viewed as a sum of exponential distributions. However, there have been few prior efforts to validate Erlang distribution assumptions ...

Efficient runway operations are a necessary input for the optimal use of the air transportation system. Most efforts at improving runway efficiency have failed to capture the impact of environmental costs. Here we develop an integrated approach that models this complex relationship, and provides insights regarding the value of environmental optimization for runway scheduling. More specifically,...

The aim of this paper is to explain the relationship between air pollutant-emissions and waiting times whilst aircrafts queue to access London Heathrow (LHR) runways. The approach to this problem is to develop a discrete-event simulation that describes the current landing and take-off operations, aircraft inter-arrivals and inter-departures, runway utilisation, and average waiting times for the...