Performance Evaluation of SARDA: An Individual Aircraft-Based Advisory Concept for Surface Management

Surface operations at airports in the US are based on tactical operations, where departure aircraft primarily queue up and wait at the departure runways. NASA's Spot And Runway Departure Advisor (SARDA) tool was developed to address these inefficiencies through Air Traffic Control Tower advisories. The SARDA system is being updated to include collaborative gate hold, either tactically or strategically. This paper presents the results of the human-in-the-loop evaluation of the tactical gate hold version of SARDA in a 360 simulated tower setting. The simulations were conducted for the east side of the Dallas/Fort Worth airport. The new system provides gate hold, Ground Controller and Local Controller advisories based on a single scheduler. Simulations were conducted with SARDA on and off, the off case reflecting current day operations with no gate hold. Scenarios based on medium (1.2x current levels) and heavy (1.5x current levels) traffic were explored. Data collected from the simulation were analyzed for runway usage, delay for departures and arrivals, and fuel consumption. Further, Traffic Management Initiatives were introduced for a subset of the aircraft. Results indicated that runway usage did not change with the use of SARDA, i.e., there was no loss in runway throughput as compared to baseline. Taxiing delay was significantly reduced with the use of advisory by 45% in medium scenarios and 60% in heavy. Observed gate-holds were less than 15 minutes in all but one scenario, and even in this scenario 95% of the aircraft had a gate hold of less than 15 minutes. Arrival delay was unaffected by the use of advisory. Total fuel consumption was also reduced by 23% in medium traffic and 33% in heavy. TMI compliance appeared unaffected by the advisory.