Software Tool for Significantly Increasing Airport Throughput

NASA's Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) Airportal effort seeks to optimize aircraft surface movements through approaches that could double or triple airport and metroplex throughput. This goal can only be achieved through accurate modeling of airport/metroplex throughput, identifying the real causes of bottlenecks (not simply those that are politically palatable), proposing an innovative solution to eliminate these bottlenecks, and developing performance metrics that actually capture when the innovative solution is working and any corrective actions that may be required. The proposed innovation by Metron Aviation consists of the following components: (1) Accurate model of airport throughput taking into account aircraft and gate attributes (2) Virtual sequencing and scheduling program: Virtual queue based on aircraft type, scheduled departure time, and air carrier constraints; Aircraft virtual departure sequence prior to pushback based on the minimum time to drain a virtual queue by taking into account wake vortex constraints, (3) Increased Situational awareness and communications among ground/metering, local, and ramp controllers, and (4) Airport throughput performance metrics. Overall, this Metron Aviation innovation provides a software tool that will improve airport situational awareness, the reduction/elimination and management of potential surface flow bottlenecks that lead to a significant improvement in airport throughput.

FAA, other government agencies, airport authorities, and air carriers will benefit from the proposed software tool for the efficient management of traffic flow through improved throughput at airports with minimal delays. Performance based automated traffic flow planning will also improve situational awareness at airports among controllers at the Airport Traffic Control Tower and Ramp Controllers at the Airport Terminals. Besides aerospace, the proposed algorithms and software can easily be generalized towards transportation, manufacturing, logistics and military resource planning.

This SBIR benefits NASA in three (3) ways: (1) It furthers one of the main goals of NASA's Airportal project -- the increase of capacity by increasing throughput and operational efficiency in an airportal environment by harmonizing gate and aircraft attributes for airport arrivals, (2) the introduction of an innovative technique for increasing departure rate throughput through virtual queues and aircraft sequencing as part of NASA's vision of maximizing productivity in the use of runways and taxiways, and (3) NASA's decision support tools developed for surface operations, such as SMA and SMS will benefit from recommendations on reducing or eliminating bottlenecks.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 2) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.