Date of Award

Summer 7-2019

Access Type

Thesis - Open Access

Degree Name

Master of Science in Aeronautics

Department

College of Aviation

Committee Chair

Dahai Liu

First Committee Member

Carlos A. Castro

Abstract

As the air transportation industry expands, airports face numerous challenges to manage the increasing traffic. Among these problems, runway crossings are a considerable source of ground traffic inefficiency and risk. Building end-around taxiways are the only strategy to avoid crossings, but these are not always feasible, and therefore airport planners must find alternatives. This study consisted of a simulation over an airport that currently requires a vast amount of its arrivals to go through runway crossings in order to reach the apron; the airport simulation software utilized was the Total Airspace and Airport Modeler (TAAM). The process began with a thorough validation of a baseline model against the historical data of the airport, followed by the design and simulation of three alternatives, which had one, two, and three runway crossings subsequently added. The simulation also included two flight schedules resembling the operations of 2016 and 2026, in order to forecast the impact of the additional crossings in the upcoming years. Finally, an analysis with ANOVAs and t-tests of the simulation outputs revealed significant decreases in arrival and departure taxi times, along with no significant changes in runway or sequencing delay.

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