Modeling Arrival Flight Traffic Using Arena®

An arrival flight traffic model is presented to simulate time-varying arrivals via airport arrival fixes to runway. The underlying simulation was developed to support an analysis of airborne holding at airport meter fixes, based on changes in arrival capacity and operating procedures of the destination airport. A principal challenge was developing a modeling approach for aircraft arrivals, where it is understood that the arrival rate varies by time-of-day, day-of-the-week and season. Analysis of inter-arrival time of flights during a selected peak arrival period, of the first seven months in 2004 at George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH) was performed on data obtained from Aviation System Performance Metrics (ASPM) and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) database. Arena® input analyzer was used to generate mathematical expressions, based on the inter-arrival time distribution of aircraft extracted from the database, for the “Create module”. In the simulation, probable arrivals were generated to mimic flight transitions from extreme arc to specific runways at IAH. The simulation results gave an estimate of the number of flights, with their transition time between the arcs, which arrives at IAH within a select peak period.