Airport Ground Resource Planning Tool

The NASA-developed Surface Management System (SMS) is currently being used by several air carriers on a daily basis. Although SMS was intended to create shared awareness between FAA and National Airspace System (NAS) user stakeholders in airport traffic management, it was not designed to address the specific needs of air carriers or airport authorities. This suggests a market for an airport automation tool aimed directly at the decisions that air carriers must make every day and which can significantly impact their business efficiency. This project will design and build a tool to improve the efficiency with which airport ground resources are used. Substantial re-designing of the displays relative to those available in SMS will improve the system's usability. Moreover, the complexity of the problem of optimizing resource assignment in the presence of the uncertainties involved suggest that automation may be able to improve efficiency and reduce the planner's workload. The Airport Ground Resource Planning (AGRP) tool will include both appropriate graphical user interfaces for visualizing resource allocations and making manual entries as well as advanced planning algorithms to recommend efficient allocation decisions. Phase 1 will study a single resource ? the off-load crews for a cargo operation.