Carbon Footprint and Total Fuel Consumption Benefit Evaluation of a Proposed Decision Support System Algorithm for Istanbul Ataturk Airport Surface Movement Area

Abstract

The continuous growth in air traffic volume causes extra operational fuel consumption due to serious ground delays at major airports. Effective ground movement management of aircraft plays an essential role in reducing or even eliminating these ground holds and congestions. Ground movement of aircraft is conventionally done by ground controllers using conventional techniques, which rely on static and short-term (dynamic) planning. Such planning usually overlooks possible in-flight delays, which lead to gate assignment problems (GAP) at destination airports. Ground movement decision support system is proposed as an alternative method to mitigate these problems. This system allocates available taxi paths to arriving and departing aircraft. Such a dynamic planning provides more robust taxi path assignment and delay management at the airports movement area especially in the peak hours. This study analyzes time benefits and time cost effects of this system using SIMMOD, which is a fast time simulation tool. In order to demonstrate the fuel consumption benefits of tactical taxi path allocation, two scenarios (baseline and alternative), have been generated and tested for Istanbul Ataturk Airport.

Keywords: Airport Modeling, Carbon Footprint, Heuristic Algorithm, Airport Ground Delays, Air Traffic Management

DOI: 10.7176/JSTR/6-04-06