Design , Testing and Evaluation of a Pushback Rate Control Strategy

Airport surface congestion results in significant increases in taxi times and fuel burn at major airports. This paper describes the implementation of a congestion control strategy at Boston Logan International Airport (BOS). The approach predicts the departure throughput in the next 15 minute interval, and recommends a rate at which to release pushbacks from the gate in order to control congestion. Two Android tablet computers were used for the implementation of the strategy; one to input the data, and the other to display the recommended rate to the air traffic controllers. Two potential decision-support displays were tested: a rate control display that only presented a color-coded suggested pushback rate, and a volume control display that provided additional support to the controllers on the number of aircraft that had called-ready and had been released. A survey of controllers showed that they had found the decisionsupport tool easy to use, especially the additional functionality provided by the volume control display. During 8 four-hour test periods in 2011, fuel use was reduced by an estimated 9 US tons (2,650 US gallons), and aircraft taxi times decreased by an average of 5.3 min for the 144 flights that were held at the gate, showing that such a congestion control strategy could yield significant benefits.