A comparison of aircraft trajectory-based and aggregate queue-based control of airport taxi processes

There is significant potential to decrease fuel burn, emissions, and delays of aircraft at airports by optimizing surface operations. A simple surface traffic optimization approach is to hold aircraft back at the gates based on aggregate information on surface queues. Depending on the level of surface surveillance and onboard equipage, it may also be possible to use a more complex approach, namely, to simultaneously optimize the surface trajectories of all taxiing aircraft. Using data from the Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County airport (DTW), this paper compares the benefits of the two approaches, and finds that at a relatively uncongested airport such as DTW, the aggregate queue-based approach only yields modest improvements in taxi-out time, while the trajectory-based approach yields a nearly 23% decrease in average taxi-out time (achieving the average unimpeded taxi-out time).