INFLUENCE OF DEMAND PATTERN ON RELATION BETWEEN OVERALL TURNAROUND TIME AND AVERAGE GATE OCCUPATION DEPENDING ON AVAILABLE RESOURCES

It is of strategic and economic importance for airports to know the required deployment of resources needed to efficiently handle aircraft turnarounds while ensuring high customer satisfaction even with considerably varying traffic volumes. This case study, based on traffic data from a mid-sized international European Airport, presents an investigation of relation between the occupation of the boarding and deboarding facility (e.g. passenger gate), which represent the key resource and the overall turnaround time depending on other available necessary resources for some given demand list and its numerous variations. The case study includes extensive simulation results and analysis of resources needed for the turnaround process in various traffic densities and the availability of ground handling resources. The main finding of the simulation data analysis is, that power functions provide very well fitting for the relation between the overall turnaround durations and their related average gate occupations for different considered availabilities of ground handling resources and traffic demands (for the same list of flights). Moreover, to approximate the resource limits for reasonable overall turnaround durations which are comparable to the values gained at the simulations with unlimited resources, it is sufficient to use the median values of the maximal numbers of utilized resources. The method and findings of this study might be valuable to estimate a reasonable utilization of ground handling resources and to calculate the layout of gates for planned or expanding airports to satisfy an expected traffic demand

DESIGN AND FINDINGS OF A WORKSHOP REGARDING SECURITY PROCEDURES AND DEMAND FOR TECHNICAL SUPPORT AT A GROUND CONTROLLER WORKING POSITION

Unquestionably, security awareness is an important topic in air traffic control. The ground controller support system TraMICS includes already a security component and displays an indication regarding the current security situation to the controller. This paper reports about a workshop performed with eight controllers. It describes the methodology and the results of the workshop aimed to find out, how the security situations indicator, its concept, calculation and notification could be improved. Moreover, since security situations interrupt planned workflow, the paper investigates understanding and operational interpretation of the term disturbance in the air traffic ground controller domain and specifies its definitio

IMPLICATIONS AND BENEFITS OF AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS’ MANUAL ASSESSMENT OF THE SECURITY SITUATION INDICATOR

Validation trials with air traffic controllers followed by a workshop have confirmed, that the Security Situations Indicator provides valuable information at the controller working position. However, the possibility to adjust it by a competent person was proposed. This paper investigates potential implications of manual changes and proposes rules to maximize effectiveness. It outlines the design of the necessary user interaction and information and closes with some visualized examples

CONCEPTUALISATION FOR EVALUATING THE CURRENT RESILIENCE STATUS OF A HUMAN-IN-THE-LOOP CONTROLLER SUPPORT SYSTEM

Currently the resilience in air traffic management is evaluated by comparing the usage of an enhanced or new system to the baseline without this system. Our idea is to assess the resilience of a system without comparing it to a baseline. Therefore, appropriate performance indicators and their thresholds are to be selected to evaluate the current resilience of the system itself in real-time. A system consisting of an air traffic controller support system and the air traffic controller operating it is selected as use case. The paper describes the concept of current resilience and applies it to the use case. To investigate the validity of this approach for the selected use case a dashboard visualizing the necessary parameters is propose

Application of Severe Weather Nowcasting to Case Studies in Air Traffic Management

Effective and time-efficient aircraft assistance and guidance in severe weather environments remains a challenge for air traffic control. Air navigation service providers around the globe could greatly benefit from specific and adapted meteorological information for the controller position, helping to reduce the increased workload induced by adverse weather. The present work proposes a radar-based nowcasting algorithm providing compact meteorological information on convective weather near airports for introduction into the algorithms intended to assist in air-traffic management. The use of vertically integrated liquid density enables extremely rapid identification and short-term prediction of convective regions that should not be traversed by aircraft, which is an essential requirement for use in tactical controller support systems. The proposed tracking and nowcasting method facilitates the anticipation of the meteorological situation around an airport. Nowcasts of centroid locations of various approaching thunderstorms were compared with corresponding radar data, and centroid distances between nowcasted and observed storms were computed. The results were analyzed with Method for the Object-Based Evaluation from the Model Evaluation tools software (MET-10.0.1, Developmental Testbed Center, Boulder, CO, US) and later integrated into an assistance arrival manager software, showing the potential of this approach for automatic air traffic assistance in adverse weather scenarios

Is an NWP-Based Nowcasting System Suitable for Aviation Operations?

The growth of air transport demand expected over the next decades, along with the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as heavy rainfalls and severe storms due to climate change, will pose a tough challenge for air traffic management systems, with implications for flight safety, delays and passengers. In this context, the Satellite-borne and IN-situ Observations to Predict The Initiation of Convection for ATM (SINOPTICA) project has a dual aim, first to investigate if very short-range high-resolution weather forecast, including data assimilation, can improve the predictive capability of these events, and then to understand if such forecasts can be suitable for air traffic management purposes. The intense squall line that affected Malpensa, the major airport by passenger traffic in northern Italy, on 11 May 2019 is selected as a benchmark. Several numerical experiments are performed with a Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model using two assimilation techniques, 3D-Var in WRF Data Assimilation (WRFDA) system and a nudging scheme for lightning, in order to improve the forecast accuracy and to evaluate the impact of assimilated different datasets. To evaluate the numerical simulations performance, three different verification approaches, object-based, fuzzy and qualitative, are used. The results suggest that the assimilation of lightning data plays a key role in triggering the convective cells, improving both location and timing. Moreover, the numerical weather prediction (NWP)-based nowcasting system is able to produce reliable forecasts at high spatial and temporal resolution. The timing was found to be suitable for helping Air Traffic Management (ATM) operators to compute alternative landing trajectories

Forecasting the weather to assist ATC and ATM operations

In EUROCONTROLS's recent summary report on Climate Changes Risks for European Aviation, several weather-related impacts were highlighted. There is a strong relation between highly impacting weather events and disruptions to the aviation network resulting in additional fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. In Europe, severe weather is responsible for up to 7.5% of the total en-route delays. In this respect, the H2020 Satellite-borne and IN-situ Observations to Predict The Initiation of Convection for ATM (SINOPTICA) project aims to demonstrate that very high-resolution and very short-range numerical weather forecasts, benefiting from the assimilation of radar data, in-situ weather stations, GNSS and lightning data, can improve the prediction of extreme weather events to the benefit of Air Traffic Management (ATM) and Air Traffic Control (ATC) operations. The assimilation of radar, GNSS, and lightning data shows a positive impact on the forecast of the convective cells for the four selected severe weather events. Moreover, two radar-based nowcasting strategies, PhaSt and RaNDeVIL, are tested to predict storm structures. Both methods are able to follow the more intense cells (VIL > 10 kg/m2) in all the case studies, as shown by the MODE results and the eye-ball verification The forecasts are used in an arrival management system (AMAN) to compute 4D trajectories around convective areas, integrate the affected aircraft into the arrival sequence, and assist air traffic controllers in implementing the approaches through just in time advisories and dynamic weather displays. With the help of real traffic scenarios and different weather models, diverse approach planning strategies are evaluated

Definitions of Disturbance, Resilience and Robustness in ATM Context

Resilience is a fundamental property of the natural ecosystem that enables quick recovery after numerous disturbances occurring frequently. This vital ability of the ecosystem makes resilience a very desirable property of man-made socio-technical systems, one of which is an ATM System. In ecology and in other domains there are a lot of definitions and interpretations of the term resilience. Most of them fall into two big groups with semantical meanings ”resilience“ and ”robustness“. Currently in the ATM Context exists a definition of resilience from the safety science perspective only. Since we investigate resilience of an ATM System from the more general - performance point of view, which includes safety with performance aspects, it is necessary to develop conceptual definitions of resilience and robustness of an ATM System, which have a clear differentiation between these terms and enable their measurement. The aim of this report is to give a short description of the developed framework, which incorporates created concept of robustness, resilience and relevant terms: disturbance, stress and perturbation. The created framework is illustrated with one simple example and is accomplished with an according decision-making chain. The report also suggests some qualitative and quantitative measures of resilience and robustness and provides a structured approach for investigation of these properties of a system. In spite of the fact, that the concept is developed in the ATM Context, it is transferable and can be used for any socio-technical system

Annulus and Center Location Problems

In this work we study and investigate the minimum width annulus problem (MWAP), the circle center location or circle location problem (CLP) and the point center location or point location problem (PLP) on Rectilinear and Chebyshev planes as well as in networks. The relations between the problems have served as a basis for finding of elegant solution, algorithms for both new and well known problems. So, MWAP was formulated and investigated in Rectilinear space. In contrast to Euclidean metric, MWAP and PLP have at least one common optimal point. Therefore, MWAP on Rectilinear plane was solved in linear time with the help of PLP. Hence, the solution sequence was PLP-->MWAP. It was shown, that MWAP and CLP are equivalent. Thus, CLP can be also solved in linear time. The obtained results were analysed and transfered to Chebyshev metric. After that, the notions of circle, sphere and annulus in networks were introduced. It should be noted that the notion of a circle in a network is different from the notion of a cycle. An O(mn) time algorithm for solution of MWAP was constructed and implemented. The algorithm is based on the fact that the middle point of an edge represents an optimal solution of a local minimum width annulus on this edge. The resulting complexity is better than the complexity O(mn+n^2logn) in unweighted case of the fastest known algorithm for minimizing of the range function, which is mathematically equivalent to MWAP. MWAP in unweighted undirected networks was extended to the MWAP on subsets and to the restricted MWAP. Resulting problems were analysed and solved. Also the p–minimum width annulus problem was formulated and explored. This problem is NP–hard. However, the p–MWAP has been solved in polynomial O(m^2n^3p) time with a natural assumption, that each minimum width annulus covers all vertexes of a network having distances to the central point of annulus less than or equal to the radius of its outer circle. In contrast to the planar case MWAP in undirected unweighted networks have appeared to be a root problem among considered problems. During investigation of properties of circles in networks it was shown that the difference between planar and network circles is significant. This leads to the nonequivalence of CLP and MWAP in the general case. However, MWAP was effectively used in solution procedures for CLP giving the sequence MWAP-->CLP. The complexity of the developed and implemented algorithm is of order O(m^2n^2). It is important to mention that CLP in networks has been formulated for the first time in this work and differs from the well–studied location of cycles in networks. We have constructed an O(mn+n^2logn) algorithm for well–known PLP. The complexity of this algorithm is not worse than the complexity of the currently best algorithms. But the concept of the solution procedure is new – we use MWAP in order to solve PLP building the opposite to the planar case solution sequence MWAP-->PLP and this method has the following advantages: First, the lower bounds LB obtained in the solution procedure are proved to be in any case better than the strongest Halpern’s lower bound. Second, the developed algorithm is so simple that it can be easily applied to complex networks manually. Third, the empirical complexity of the algorithm is equal to O(mn). MWAP was extended to and explored in directed unweighted and weighted networks. The complexity bound O(n^2) of the developed algorithm for finding of the center of a minimum width annulus in the unweighted case does not depend on the number of edges in a network, because the problems can be solved in the order PLP-->MWAP. In the weighted case computational time is of order O(mn^2).Annulus and Zentrenproblem

Dynamic Usage of Capacity for Arrivals and Departures in Queue Minimization

To analyse and solve air traffic problems of an airport in the time scope of, for instance, 24 hours we have to control traffic flows of aggregated flights rather than individual flights. Hence, queue arising from flow management is the unique physical value characterising it