A New 3D Evaluation Approach of Practical Airside Capacity at Airports

A new 3D evaluation approach of the practical airside capacity at airports was introduced taking into consideration the aircraft ground traffic conditions. A network was built to represent the airside of an airport. Then a new approach based on the solution of successive optimization problems was proposed for the estimation of the practical airside capacity of an airport. For given mean in-bound and out-bound flows and a current ground traffic situation, a constrained minimal cost flow problem was formulated. The interaction of aircraft flows at ground intersections (taxi ways and aprons) was taken explicitly into consideration and this leaded to a non convex optimization problem. A heuristic approach was developed to get a solution for the minimal cost flow problem. The proposed heuristic was assessed numerically through extensive testing, showing acceptable performances. The proposed approach has been applied to the case of Pudong International Airport for which some numerical results are displayed.