Digital Simulations of Runway Utilization

Queues of aircraft that form at airports, both in the air and on the ground, are the biggest source of delay in civil air transport operations. The study of these queues is complicated by the fact that the times at which aircraft join the queues are not independent, and also by considerable diurnal fluctuation of traffic.This paper describes an approach, primarily through simulation of idealized models, on a digital computer. The object of the work was to obtain insight into the behaviour of runway queues rather than to imitate the activity of a particular airport. The models used assume that the arrival times at the queues are the result of a scheduled pattern being disordered through aircraft being independently early or late. Such an arrival process degenerates to a Poisson process if the discrepancies from schedule are very large, but in practice it is significantly different. Results from 300,000 simulated take-offs and landings are given.