Project Profiles

It is an obvious fact that today, our airport surfaces are slow and congested. As the number of aircraft operations continues to increase within our nation's major airports, this problem will continue to worsen. An important goal of NextGen is to provide new airport surface operation decision support tools and traffic management automation solutions for the traffic manager (FAA), flight crews, and airport operator. These tools would provide the optimum runway, taxiway, queue management process, gate pushback timing, and collaborative human-machine interactions to maximize the traffic throughput, while minimizing taxi delay and environmental impact. In addition, the airport surface must be managed to minimize aircraft conflict with other aircraft and ground vehicles as congestion increases.

The Test Bed will be used to develop, test, and demonstrate the airport surface decision support tools to accomplish these NextGen goals. Initially, prototype tools for timing gate pushback and choosing departure taxi path to minimize waiting queue delays will be developed and investigated.