Empirical Evaluation of Impact of Reconfiguration Events on Airport Capacity

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The forecasting of NAS capacity in the one- to six-hour time frame is important for realtime traffic flow management planning. Airport and airspace capacity estimation is an ongoing area of research with much of the effort focused on model building. Here we report an empirical approach to evaluate the impact of reconfiguration events on airport capacity. We propose a method for identifying reconfiguration events in traffic data. We also discuss methods and propose a method for evaluating throughput reduction before, during and after reconfiguration events. Throughput reduction has substantial variance and we did not find strong correlating environmental factors to explain why some reconfiguration events suffer greater throughput loss than others. We found that the throughput loss at most airports passes tests for statistical significance, though the results are sensitive to both the confidence level and the time window width. Over a two-hour time period the throughput loss is indistinguishable from the control group at several airports, indicating compensating throughput before and/or after the reconfiguration event. Most airports do not show significant throughput loss sensitivity to the particular runways involved in the reconfiguration events. Reconfiguration event throughput loss generally is (i) less at airports with higher reconfiguration frequency and (ii) greater at larger airports. Finally, we develop a method to account for throughput loss and its uncertainty, for forecasted reconfiguration events.