On the control of airport departure operations.

This thesis is focused on airport departure operations; its objective is to assign a value to surface surveillance information within a collaborative framework. The research develops a cooperative concept that improves the control of departure operations at busy airports and evaluates its merit using a classical and widely accepted airport departure model. The research then assumes departure operations are collaboratively controlled and develops a stochastic model of taxi operations on the airport surface. Finally, this study investigates the effect of feeding back different levels of surface surveillance information to the departure control process. More specifically, it examines the environmental and operational impact of aircraft surface location information on the taxi clearance process. Benefits are evaluated by measuring and comparing engine emissions for given runway utilization rates.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Eric Feron; Committee Co-Chair: Steven W. McLaughlin; Committee Member: George Riley; Committee Member: Jeff S. Shamma; Committee Member: John-Paul Clarke; Committee Member: Karen Feig