Analysis of Taxi Conformance Monitoring Algorithms and Performance

Current airport surface safety systems that are intended to protect against runway incursions provide conflict alerts with minimal lead time, and do not provide any protection against errors in taxi routing unless a conflict or collision is imminent. The safety of the airport surface operation may be increased through the use of a taxi route conformance monitoring tool, which would alert both pilots and controllers automatically when a flight deviates from its assigned taxi route. This paper addresses an analysis of performance of a prototype taxi conformance algorithm. The analysis presented in this paper was conducted using flight plan data and airport surface surveillance data from the Louisville, Kentucky airport, where detailed information is available to support the operation of these prototype algorithms. Through the operation of these algorithms with recorded data, we have analyzed taxi conformance monitoring performance with regard to the occurrence of false alarms, missed alerts, and the response time to positively identified taxi conformance deviations.