A New Model in Runway Operations Management for Airside Capacity Enhancement (in Multiple Airports)

Recently, a significant increase in demand of airports caused many problems such as resulting in delay and wasting economical costs. Then, for preventing these problems, optimal use of runways is one of the best ways for complete use of available resources. Runway Operations Management is related to increase in utility of using the available runways that are bottlenecks in many airports. The main task of Runway Operations Management is: Runway Configuration Management, Runway Assignment Management and Runway Operations Planning that are assumed in this paper. A model have been developed for determined configuration due to the runway configuration for airports at any time of the year. It should be noted that airport capacity is mostly expressed as sum of landing and take off operations. Current and predicted levels of air traffic demand, raise the need for airport capacity enhancements, as well as reduction of the environmental impact (engine emissions) and the costs incurred by operational inefficiencies (fuel burn). In an effort to satisfy such a need, the presence of an automated decision support system, which includes planning and control algorithms, will be a significant contribution.One of the ways of runway capacity enhancement is increasing their numbers. Constructing of new runways is not possible because it imposes heavy costs and requires occupying urban lands. Moreover, increasing the number of runways without optimum operations planning and assignment will not be undertaken completely. Using which runway, for which operation, in which time plays an important part in the runways system capacity. For example, in an airport with the single runway, the following parameters have their own influential rules in determining operations planning: configuration of runways, arrival and departure volumes, volume and place of fixes in a time, place and number of apron gates, place and number of taxiways and exit rapid taxiways, mix of aircrafts, etc. An increase of the number, geometric complexity, runway’s orientation and location, runway crossing points and final approach of runways, workloads of the controllers is so important that without optimum operations planning and assignments, most of the capacity of the runways and ultimately the airside capacity, won’t be used. In addition, strong delays, wasting of economic resources and dissatisfaction of the airport users, among the passengers and airlines, are of the other consequences.This paper presents a procedure for considering Runway Assignment Management and Runway Operations Planning together which were considered separate till now. A scheduling model was used for this analysis which indicates a good efficiency in integrating Runway Assignment Management and Runway Operations Planning.