Modeling and control of the departure process of congested airports

Abstract

A simple queueing model of departure operations at congested airports is proposed. This model is calibrated and validated in the case of Boston Logan airport, using runway configuration and traffic data from the Airline Service Quality Performance (ASQP) dataset. The model is then used to evaluate preliminary departure control schemes aimed at alleviating congestion on the airport surface. The potential impact of these control schemes on direct operating costs, environmental costs and overall delay is quantified and discussed. This thesis also demonstrates that the ASQP dataset does not record enough traffic to precisely identify arrival-departure interaction effects, which results in large uncertainties in the departure model. Since more complete datasets could become available in the near future, the thesis shows how such datasets could be used to reduce the departure model uncertainties.