A Simulator for Modeling Aircraft Surface Operations at Airports

Rapid prototyping of integrated taxiway and runway schedulers at airports has become highly desirable for Safe and Efficient Surface Operations (SESO) to support the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen). Finding optimal solutions for taxiway and runway scheduling are generally computationally difficult and therefore it is essential to develop fast algorithms that can produce high quality solutions for the scheduling problems. Equally important is to develop a fast-time simulation that can be integrated with these algorithms and can handle high traffic demand in the presence of uncertainties. This paper describes the development of Surface Operations Simulator and Scheduler (SOS) that can facilitate the integration of several scheduling algorithms with the surface simulation of the aircraft. The SOS architecture is used to implement First-Come-First-Served (FCFS) heuristics and a comparison to the average taxi times of actual data from Dallas Fort Worth International (DFW) airport with SOS output is made. The integration of a dynamic programming departure scheduler with FCFS taxiway heuristics demonstrates the modular architecture of SOS and a comparison to the output of pure FCFS heuristics demonstrates the potential system-wide savings in taxi delay over FCFS scheduling.