Evaluation Plan for an Airport Surface-Operation Automation Concept

The predicted growth in air travel demands capacity enhancement in the National Airspace System, and congestion at key airports has been recognized as one of the most prominent problem areas. With flights operating at limits dictated by operational requirements associated with current airport configurations, airport expansion plans involving addition of new runways and taxiways are being realized to increase the airports’ capacities. However, the expansion plans necessarily increase the complexity of the airport configurations, which tends to penalize the efficiency of the system, partially offsetting the capacity-related benefits of the investments. The Surface Operation Automation Research (SOAR) concept has been proposed as a collaborative concept to provide automation for surface-traffic management and the flight deck to enhance the operational efficiency in complex airport environments, thus reversing the penalties to fully realize the capacity benefits sought by the airport expansion plans. Development and evaluation of the SOAR concept is being pursued in a 5-year program, and this paper describes the experiments being designed for an initial evaluation during the second year of this program.