A Concept of Operations for Trajectory-based Taxi Operations

A harmonized concept of operations (ConOps) for future surface operations that considers the surface management practices and policies that currently exist in the U.S. and Europe was developed by NASA and DLR. The high-level concept vision is to develop the framework for surface traffic scheduling systems that generate conflict-free four-dimensional trajectories (4DTs) for all aircraft on the airport surface and for guidance means on board and on ground to enable the flight crew to adhere to the trajectories. This vision supports the reduction of temporal uncertainty and delays by improving the whole planning chain from gate to runway and vice versa. This paper identifies and describes the necessary functions of this concept and explains the relationships among them. As a result of this activity, challenges arose which are the basis to derive research requirements that are jointly approached by NASA and DLR in the future. The concept is supported through a solid base of results from research already conducted in that area to support the implementation of this concept in the future.