Assessing the Impact of the Runway System Configuration on Airport Capacity

The accommodation of the continued growth of air transportation poses a challenge. Throughout the recent years, the political and strategic debate has highlighted airport capacity as one of the key constraining factors. In order to bridge the gap, the efficient utilization of the current capacity is a primary goal. To support the decision making, the measurement and evaluation of capacity reductions is a vital capability for operational performance assessment. This paper presents a feasibility study investigating the impact of changes of the runway system configuration on the observed operational airside capacity performance. The goal of the research is to augment the current operational performance framework within the airport context to explain the impact or stability (resilience) of the observed performance based on the used runway system configuration. The work is performed as an empirical post-operational use-case analysis on a subset of 5 European airports. An data-driven approach to the determination of the runway system configurations has been developed while evaluating the chosen airports. This allowed for the initial selection of parameters presented in this paper. The results reported in this paper demonstrate the general feasibility of the approach and support the further refinement of operational performance measures, but also the definition of a runway configuration change resilience measure. The work will be further validated and integrated into the regular monitoring of the Performance Review Unit.