Coordinated Airport Facility Development under Uncertainty

Abstract

This paper presents an applied computation tool for coordinating various airport facility expansions and gives explicit consideration of the impacts of various uncertainties. An airport is modeled as a system consisting of components (e.g., runways, air cargo terminals, and maintenance facilities) that operate in series or in parallel. To balance (i.e., equalize) roughly the capacities of the components acting in series, the paper proposes a network flow formulation in which interactions between user flows and facilities are modeled. In addition to the uncertainty in air traffic forecasts, the effect of an uncertain aircraft mix is also considered. The final model is a stochastic mixed-integer nonlinear program that is converted to its deterministic equivalent because the number of stochastic scenarios is finite. An interactive solution framework is proposed to solve the problem after the problem's properties are explored. Numerical studies were conducted to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed model and effectiveness of the solution algorithm. Prospective work includes application of the proposed development approach to a real-world case study.