Airport surface management and runways scheduling

Abstract

This article focuses on the interactions that have to be developed between the runways scheduling (AMAN-DMAN) systems and the surface management (SMAN) system, in order to reduce the ground delay at Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport. The departures delay resulting from the optimised runways scheduling is compared to the total ground delay that can be measured by simulation, when all the taxiing constraints of aircraft are introduced. During traffic peaks, the runways capacity appears to be twice less penalizing than the whole airport traffic management process. As a consequence, some optimisation methods are defined and tested to perform the conflicts resolution between taxiing aircraft and make it more consistent with the runways scheduling. The new ground traffic simulations carried out confirm the significant delay reduction that could be obtained.