Analysis of potential benefits of arrival-departure procedures proposed for ORD

On June 13, 2004 the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) implemented a new procedure at Chicago O´Hare International Airport (ORD) that authorizes arrival-departure operations on intersecting runways 14R/27L with modified separation requirements at the runway intersection. The procedure is expected to recoup reductions in arrival and departure capacities associated with operations on these runways that resulted from discontinuing land-and-hold-short operations (LAHSO) in 2000 and reduce arrival and departure delays at ORD when the airport is operated in plan B configuration. This configuration is used about 10 percent of the time. This paper describes the background analysis of relevant operational metrics conducted to compare and evaluate candidate procedures for their relative benefits and to help select the most promising ones. It describes the model developed to quantify and visualize the airport´s operations, the methodology used to validate model performance with ARTS data, and the Monte Carlo approach taken for comparing and evaluating capacity benefits of four candidate arrival-departure procedures.