Simulating Aircraft Delay Absorption
April 2003
Justin Boesel, The MITRE Corporation
ABSTRACT
An airplane's ability to absorb delay while airborne is lim-ited
and costly. Because of this, the air traffic control sys-tem anticipates
and manages excessive demand for scarce shared resources, such as arrival
runways or busy airspace, so that the delay necessary for buffering
can be spread out over a larger distance, or taken on the ground before
depar-ture. It is difficult to model these important dynamics in a standard
queue-resource simulation framework, which does not account for limited
delay absorption capacity. The modeling methodology presented here captures
these dy-namics by employing a large number of independent threads of
execution to monitor and enforce a large number of relatively simple
mathematical relationships. These re-lationships calculate feasible
time windows for each por-tion of each flight. The model was implemented
in the SLX simulation language. The speed and scalability of SLX are
essential to the approach, which would otherwise be impractical.
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