Evaluation plan for system-wide benefits of an airport surface-operation automation concept

The predicted growth in air travel requires capacity enhancement in the National Airspace System (NAS), and congestion at key airports has been recognized as one of the most prominent problem areas. With flights operating at limits dictated by operational requirements associated with current airport configurations, airport expansion plans involving addition of new runways and taxiways are in place to increase the airports' capacities. However, the expansion projects necessarily increase the complexity of the airport configurations, which tends to penalize the efficiency of the system, partially offsetting the capacity-related benefits of the investments. The surface operation automation research (SOAR) concept has been proposed as a collaborative concept to provide automation for surface-traffic management (STM) and the flight deck to enhance the operational efficiency in complex airport environments, thus softening the unintended penalties associated with airport expansions. STM automation is based on the ground-operation situation awareness and flow efficiency (GO-SAFE) concept previously reported to ease runway access conflicts, especially in situations where active-runway crossings constitute a significant taxi delay problem. To help achieve the potential GO-SAFE benefits, the flight-deck automation for reliable ground operation (FARGO) concept has been proposed to provide the necessary flight-deck automation for enabling precision taxi control to comply with GO-SAFE advisories. Development and evaluation of the SOAR concept is being pursued in a 5-year program. A previous publication has documented an initial evaluation of the concept based on computer simulations of surface operations at a single hub airport. Expanding on this previous evaluation, this paper describes a NAS-wide evaluation effort to assess the system-wide benefits of the SOAR concept.