NYSERDA-Funded Project To Reduce Taxi Times, Increase On-Time Performance, Lessen Fuel Burn And Emissions At Congested Airports

Excessive delays on the airport tarmac are often caused by ramp area congestion and limited gate resources. Airlines and airport ramp operators typically only track gate occupancy based on predicted gate-in and out times reflected by the schedule and updates to flight times. Deciding which aircraft are entering or exiting the ramp area, and at what time, is done manually and oftentimes with limited information that inadvertently leads to delays.

A managed gate operations decision support tool for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) is under development by Sensis Corporation. The managed gate operations tool will provide airline and airport ramp operators who are charged with managing a portion of the taxi-in and taxi-out of aircraft with automated recommendations on the most advantageous flight timing and sequencing in the vicinity of the gates. By taking advantage of automated, optimized recommendations, taxi times can be reduced; on-time arrivals increased; and fuel burn and CO2 emissions decreased.

The system will employ sophisticated algorithms and proprietary airport surface prediction capabilities to provide ramp operators with a recommended order and timing of entry and exit of the gate area based on live surveillance data, airline schedule information, predictions of arrival times at the ramp entry, and external constraints such as any prescribed ramp exit times for departures. The managed gate operations tool will recommend actions such as holding certain flights at the gate to allow others to pass, sending some departures out earlier than scheduled or devising a sequence of movements that best achieves taxi-time reduction goals.

"Our preliminary review of data from a major northeastern U.S. airport indicates approximately 300 in-bound flights a week are delayed more than five minutes while taxiing to the gate," said Ken Kaminski, vice president and general manager of Sensis Air Traffic Systems. "We estimate that for these flights an average taxi-in reduction of two minutes is possible through use of improved flight sequences, resulting in a cumulative yearly savings of $1.6 million for the airlines at that airport."

"NYSERDA has invested in a variety of promising transportation-related research projects, and all of them have the same goal – to reduce our use of fossil fuels and our emissions of greenhouse gases, while growing our clean-energy economy and creating jobs," said Francis J. Murray Jr., President and CEO of NYSERDA. "Sensis has a promising new technology that will not only do all that, but could also make air travel more convenient. NYSERDA is proud to be behind it."

FMI: www.sensis.com, www.nyserda.org