Airport Configuration Prediction

Airport configuration is a primary factor in various airport characteristics such as arrival and departure capacities and terminal area traffic patterns. These characteristics, in turn, are central to a variety of Air Traffic Management (ATM) decisions that in turn affect delays and efficiency in the National Airspace System (NAS). There is presently poor knowledge about the airport characteristics at each airport and even less information available about how those characteristics are expected to change in the future. This lack of knowledge about airports results in inefficient local and national traffic management decisions. Metron Aviation will develop and test a set of models that generate information about airport configuration and related airport characteristics. This information, which is not currently available or is of poor quality, will improve traffic management decisions, and automation to support those decisions, both at the airports and on a national scale. This work addresses existing gaps in air traffic management automation technologies. The proposed technology development promise immediate improvements to the NAS. Rather than requiring a new tool or system to be deployed, the information generated by this work could be absorbed into existing systems and information networks to transparently improve traffic management on a local and national scale.