NETWORK-BASED SIMULATION OF AIRCRAFT AT GATES IN AIRPORT TERMINALS

Simulation is becoming an essential tool for planning, design, and man agement of airport facilities. A simulation of aircraft at gates at an airport can be applied for various periodically performed application s, relating to the dynamic behavior of aircraft at gates in airport te rminals for analyses, evaluations, and decision supports. Conventional ly, such simulations are implemented using an event-driven method. For a more efficient simulation, this paper proposes a network-based meth od. The basic idea is to transform. all the sequence and constraint re lations of aircraft at gates into a network. The simulation is done by calculating the longest path to all the nodes in the network. The eff ect of the algorithm of the proposed method has been examined by exper iments, and the superiority of the proposed method over the event-driv en method is revealed through comprehensive comparisons of their overa ll simulation performance.