Handling airport ground operations using an A-SMGCS approach

The Advanced Surface Movement, Guidance and Control System (A-SMGCS) is a concept used by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to increase situation awareness in airports, providing airport stakeholders assistance with surface operations in terms of surveillance, control, routing and guidance tasks. The main goal is to maintain the declared surface movement rate under all visibility conditions, traffic density and airport layout while maintaining the required level of safety. This paper presents an implementation of the A-SMGCS concept, named A-Guidance, together with an assessment of the field tests performed during the deployment of the system. The A-Guidance system is experimentally deployed in two airports in Portugal to determine its compliance with A-SMGCS functional requirements for restricted access areas within the airport. The paper also outlines the capability of the A-Guidance system to cope with the management of ground handling traffic movements, including communications between the controller at the control center and vehicle drivers. The A-Guidance system architecture is presented together with an assessment of the tested system and data resulting from the field tests.