Abstract

Abstract

Everyday millions of liters of jet fuel are burnt while airplanes are¬ running on the ground and releasing tons of air polluting gases in the earth's atmosphere. Scientists and technicians believe that more efficient taxiing strategies should replace traditional aircraft ground handling methods. Multiple factors should be considered in the airport operation programming. Environment protection, energy efficiency, safety matters, performance restrictions, and airlines' financial profit are some examples of these determinative elements.
Furthermore, aircraft ground operation is the leading cause of airports' air and sound pollution. It also becomes more remarkable to the airline companies when the risk of airplane ground accident is involved. At present, airports’ control towers handle the airport's surface traffic manually. Human-made mistakes and slow responding time to high-risk occurrences may put the airplane ground handling system in serious problems. Due to this fact, the traffic control personnel have no choice except keeping departing flights in the gates and let them leave only when the entire assigned path is clear. This manual flow control approach is inefficient and causes long taxi times.
Technically, a robust mathematical formulation is able to offer optimal solutions for the airport surface operation. In this study, a new, environmentally friendly optimization formulation is developed in order to minimize the total taxiing time and aircraft’s fuel consumption on the ground by eliminating unnecessary delays. Moreover, solving airplanes' conflict problems in ground movements is guaranteed during the entire taxi-paths, since without considering the aircraft collision avoidance feature, the mathematical model will not be practical.
Based on the presented methodology, a combination of the single-engine taxiing method and truck-towing is suggested as the best practical solution. The conducted investigations indicate that this approach provides both economic and environmental benefits to the aviation industry. The accuracy of the offered model is validated by the daily aircraft’s data on the layout of the Montréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport. Three extensive sets of numerical analyses have been conducted to provide better insights into the issue. In each part of these analyses, different determinant factors such as total taxi time, total fuel consumption, and total delay have been used to compare the obtained results of the proposed approach with the current situation at the airport. After studying all effective elements and analyzing the results, an environmentally friendly and economically efficient approach is offered.