Prediction of runway configurations and airport acceptance rates for multi-airport system using gridded weather forecast

Abstract

Accurate prediction of real-time airport capacity, a.k.a. airport acceptance rates (AARs), is key to enabling efficient air traffic flow management. AARs are dependent on selected runway configurations and both are affected by weather conditions. Although there have been studies tackling on the prediction of AARs or runway configurations or both, the prediction accuracy is relatively low and only single airport is considered. This study presents a data-driven deep-learning framework for predicting both runway configurations and AARs to support efficient air traffic management for complex multi-airport systems. The two major contributions from this work are 1) the proposed model uses assembled gridded weather forecast for the terminal airspace instead of an isolated station-based terminal weather forecast, and 2) the model captures the operational interdependency aspects inherent in the parameter learning process so that proposed modeling framework can predict both runway configuration and AARs simultaneously with higher accuracy. The proposed method is demonstrated with a numerical experiment taking three major airports in New York Metroplex as the case study. The prediction accuracy of the proposed method is compared with methods in current literature and the analysis results show that the proposed method outperforms all existing methods.