Mesoscopic modeling of airport surface by object Petri nets

With increasing demands for air transportation, large airports in metropolitan areas are required to improve their performance and capacity. Although simulation is one of commonly used techniques for evaluating performance of large systems such as airports, building detailed simulation models is costly because of their complexity. This paper presents a new modeling approach for airport surface traffic and its implementation by object Petri nets. The obtained model is mesoscopic in the sense that it does not simulate real-time movement of each aircraft, but it distinguishes individual aircrafts on taxiways. Moreover, the proposed approach is generic in the sense that airport-specific properties are summarized as a small number of parameters. By simulation of the model, we can identify bottleneck on the taxiway network. We also apply congestion control based on gate holding scheme to the airport surface model and verify its effectiveness. Such a simulation-based approach contributes to evaluation and improvement of airport capacity.