Performance Evaluation of a Surface Traffic Management Tool for Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport

This paper presents detailed results from a highfidelity human-in-the-loop evaluation of an airport surface decision support tool. The Spot And Runway Departure Advisor is designed to aid controllers in managing aircraft surface operations and is based on two optimization algorithms: the Spot Release Planner and the Runway Scheduler. The Spot Release Planner provides sequence and timing advisories to the Ground controller for releasing departure aircraft into the aircraft movement area to reduce taxi delay while achieving maximum throughput. The Runway Scheduler provides take-off and arrival runway crossing sequences to the Local controller to maximize runway usage. Performance metrics from the simulation include delay, number of aircraft stops, fuel consumption, and aircraft engine emissions. The results were not consistent among the different traffic scenarios. Results from high traffic scenarios show the average departure delay and number of aircraft stops in the movement area were reduced by 64 and 68 percent, respectively. Fuel consumption and engine emissions were reduced by as much as 38 percent. There was a slight reduction in taxi time of arrival aircraft even if the emphasis of the tool was on departure traffic. However, for normal traffic scenarios there was little change in any of performance metrics mainly due to low traffic volume.