Numerical Simulation on Surface Movement Guidance and Control of Aircraft Automated by Airport Lights

This paper introduces a newly developed surface movement simulation program to simulate the movement of taxiing aircraft. The program determines automatically the shortest route for each plane, taking account of the delay time required when two or more aircraft are taxiing near each other. The following results are clarified by the use of the program: (1) Surface movement times simulated for the automated surface guidance system are not very different from those measured in the actual system. The automated surface guidance system is capable of traffic efficiency equal to that of actual system during daylight hours and with good visibility, if the method to partition taxiways into the block sections and the route selection method are good. (2) When traffic density is light, the majority of requirements to reduce the taxiing speed in the automated surface guidance system occur at the taxi-holding positions. However, aircraft are frequently required to reduce the taxiing speed even at the stop bar positions other than the taxi holding positions with increase of traffic density, thus increasing the overall number of decelerations. Therefore, highly effective stop bar lights will extend to all areas of airport surface, as traffic density increases.