31.10.2009

Successfull Gaming Exercise on Total Airport Management in FP6 project EPISODE-3

A first gaming exercise on Total Airport Management (TAM) has been carried out in the Airport Control Center Simulator (ACCES) facility of AT-One in Braunschweig. This exercise is a part of the FP6 project EPISODE-3, which has the objective to analyse the SESAR concepts and to provide some very first validation results of these concepts.

The TAM concept, a joint development of the DLR Institute of Flight Guidance (AT-One) and Eurocontrol, which is fully compliant with the SESAR concept for airport operations, defines a collaborative pre-tactical planning process of the major land- and airside airport processes. It is expected that this collaborative planning process will lead to a more efficient use of available capacities especially in predicted critical traffic situations (e.g. poor weather conditions, runway closures or massive delay situations).

In the gaming exercise operational experts from three main stakeholders – airport, airline and air navigation service provider – were confronted with a predicted severe capacity shortfall. Their task was to deal with this predicted situation by means of a collaborative planning process supported by a decision support tool prototype developed at the Institute for Flight Guidance. The experiments have produced some interesting findings about the negotiation process and the specific goals of the stakeholder agents and additional experiments are planned to investigate these further. These results will provide valuable input to current and future research activities in the area of airport operations. AT-One’s control center simulator ACCES provides an ideal experimental environment for operations concepts involving multiple stakeholders and will play an important role in the validation of Total Airport Management as envisioned in SESAR.

 

Contact:

Dr. Reiner Suikat
AT-One
Braunschweig
Tel.: +49 531 295-2565
Fax: +49 531 295-2550