An improved runwaySimulator — Simulation for runway system capacity estimation

To estimate the capacities of airport runway systems, The MITRE Corporation's Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD) developed a fast-time simulation tool named runwaySimulator. The tool has been used for the past six years to study roughly a hundred airports in support of the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) and airport system planning, acquisition decision support, concept evaluation, and planning for runway construction. The successful use of runwaySimulator has prompted MITRE to reimplement the tool with the intent of sharing it publically. The new version is now in beta testing. The new runwaySimulator describes a scenario in terms of several components, grouped by airport configuration, fleet, and rules. The last includes a component that represents separation of aircraft via a set of rules and the conditions which trigger them. The software is accompanied by a default separation component that represents separation standards and practices common in United States airspace. Rules and triggers vary with the types of operations, the orientation of runways, weather, wake classes and other attributes of flights, and the availability of various procedures and technologies. Scenarios are simulated by models of flights and a manager responsible for making procedure assignment and timing decisions about flights. The manager's heuristics seek to maximize throughput while maintaining tolerable equity of delays. In capacity mode, a run of several hundred simulated hours includes flight generation, consistent with the fleet mix, and decisions about how to serve the demand, consistent with the rules governing procedure eligibility and separation. The resulting rate of simulated operations is interpreted as capacity, i.e., maximum sustainable throughput. By varying the arrival-departure mixes in a base scenario, the software generates a capacity curve which bounds feasible hourly arrival/departure throughput pairs. The runwaySimulator software also includes features for animation and analysis of runway and procedure usage and separation enforcement. This paper provides background on runwaySimulator's development, validation, and use, describes its scenario and simulation models, and explains how the software is used to estimate capacity.