Outbound Punctuality Sequencing by Collaborative Departure Planning

Most significant delays in ATM are created on the ground during flight preparation before pushback and during ground operations until take-off. Significant benefits can be achieved by improving departure planning. This can be realised by bringing together different actors in ATM and by using their planning data in a flexible, efficient and transparent way. Departure planning can be optimised towards punctuality, towards acceptance of airlines’ planning preferences and towards efficient use of available runway capacity. A Departure Management tool (DMAN), the so-called Outbound Punctuality Sequencer (OPS), developed by NLR, is presented in this paper. The tool aims to support the pre-departure planning process in an interactive and co-operative way. Optimisation towards punctuality is achieved by using flight preference functions. The OPS DMAN tool is a planning-support tool based on balanced decision-making. The contributions of different constraint-related flight preferences to an optimised departure planning are made transparent to the user. This paper explains the tools and presents some preliminary evaluation and validation results.