On the waiting time of arriving aircrafts and the capacity of airports with one or two runways

Abstract

In this paper we examine a model for the landing procedure of aircrafts at an airport. The characteristic feature here is that due to air turbulence the safety distance between two landing aircrafts depends on the types of these two machines. Hence, an efficient routing of the aircraft to two runways may reduce their waiting time. First, we use M/SM/1 queues (with dependent service times) to model a single runway. We give the stability condition and a formula for the average waiting time of the aircrafts. Moreover, we derive easy to compute bounds on the waiting times by comparison to simpler queuing systems. In particular we study the effect of neglecting the dependency of the service times when using M/G/1-models. We then consider the case of two runways with a number of heuristic routing strategies such as coin flipping, type splitting, Round Robin and variants of the join-the-least-load rule. These strategies are analyzed and compared numerically with respect to the average delay they cause. It turns out that a certain modification of join-the-least-load gives the best results.