SOLVING PUSH-OUT CONFLICTS IN APRON TAXIWAYS OF AIRPORTS BY A NETWORK-BASED SIMULATION

At busy airports, push-out conflicts occur simultaneously in apron tax iways and affect gate assignment operations in apron controls In curre nt manual operations, it is not easy for apron controllers to consider and solve such conflicts in an exact and efficient manner, due to the uncertainties involved in the operations, the difficulties in efficie ntly controlling and solving push-out conflicts, and also the fact tha t too many more important factors should be considered in these real-t ime operations. At most airports today, a buffer time between the use of gates is introduced in gate:assignment operations to reduce the imp act of push-out conflicts to the delay of aircraft getting into, or le aving from, a gate. From the standpoint of gate assignment operations in apron control, this study analyzes aircraft ground movements and co nflicts in apron taxiways. For coping with increasing air traffic dema nd and minimizing delays caused by inefficient scheduling of aircraft ground movements, and their effect on the gate assignment operations, a network-based model is proposed to perform simulation to support the analysis of the effect of aircraft ground movements in apron taxiways to gate assignment operations. By the proposed method, the delay char acteristics of aircraft ground movements in apron taxiways and the act ivities on gates can be analyzed and studied in detail. Furthermore, t he results of the simulation are applied to solve push-out conflicts a nd minimize delays to aircraft on gates in apron control. Computationa l results of experiments are also presented and discussed. (C) 1998 El sevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.