Enhancing traffic flow management: the airport surface's role

Several ongoing NASA projects are developing key technology and knowledge necessary to enhance airport operations and provide airport status visibility into the traffic flow management process. The NASA automated traffic information display system (ATIDS) project is aimed at developing data distribution mechanisms and data format standards necessary to share individual airport data with industry users and accelerating application development and collaboration. The NASA dynamic runway occupancy measurement system (DROMS) project is collecting vast amounts of airport-centric data, analyzing it, modeling airport behavior to uncover the causal factors leading to delay, and developing algorithms to determine important airport performance metrics. This paper explores the results of these projects and the broader roadmap to developing and implementing the technology necessary to automatically interpret airport operations and integrate this knowledge into the traffic flow management process.