Improving Aircraft Turnaround Reliability

Dr Richard Wu Department of Aviation University of New South Wales Sydney, Australia

In this presentation..
1. Introduction
Situational awareness Impact on ops control & network

2. Monitoring A/C T/R on Real-time basis 3. The Back-End Agent 4. Field Tests & Issues

Introduction
1. Situational awareness
In NOCC (network ops ctl centre)
YY001 YY340 YY010 YY877 YY520 YY290 YY170 YY120

1. Situational awareness
At airports: multiple T/Rs at a time

Start

Finish

Introduction
1. Impact on ops control & network
Improved situational awareness
For ground handling agents at airports For ops controllers

Look ahead down the line of A/C R/T

Control upstream delays, so to Control delay propagation down the line

Network reliability
Take actions before having major delays

Monitoring A/C T/R

1. What if we had:
Time stamps of T/R activities of all flights & On a real-time basis

2. We could then:
Monitor the progress of multi T/Rs Effectively allocate T/R resources Look ahead down the R/T lines of all A/C in the network

Collecting time stamps

1. Mobile devices & Wireless Network
PDAs (or laptops) GPRS (or WiFi)

2. Web portal for end users

Web browser

3. Back-end database & monitoring agents

MySQL + Java TomCat Agent Tom (an in-house sim pkg)

A/C T/R Monitoring System

Y Web Server NOCC Database TOM Trigger? Trigger? SDM Package Warning?

Some Screen Shots

The Back-End agent- Tom

1. Airline Network:
A stochastic complex system
Real Ops

Buffered Schedule

The Back-End agent- Tom

1. Model complex stochastic ops/systems as a network 2. Statistical analyses generate parameters
e.g. delay frequency, delay times, mean service times of turnaround ops etc

3. Monte Carlo simulation

Run multiple A/C R/Ts in a network Consider uncertainties in ops Do scenario analyses

Field Tests
1. ATMS was tested by QF in April 2. Off-line mode was tested:
i.e. real-time monitoring functions not activated, because The purpose of this trial was to collect data and test technology

3. Data transmission:
WiFi dropped. Use GPRS instead. Real-time transmission to DB

Some Issues
1. Unions resistance over monitoring 2. User training v.s. ATMS interface
Training is required Difficult to get detailed data using PDA
e.g. the cleanness of cabin?

Not easy to write on PDAs

Laptops can overcome this.

3. What do we want from ATMS?

Monitor major activities of TR only, or in more detail?

4. Its all about WHAT data we want and HOW we get the data!

The Next Steps

1. Schedule planning v.s. ground ops
The same goal: reliable and dependable schedule ops

2. Test draft schedule while planning:

Tom takes historical data and runs any given schedules:
Identify the ops/schedule bottlenecks, so to Modify draft schedules (feedback), then Re-run the schedule until happy ^_^

3. Improve ground ops reliability:

Stabilise T/Rs (w/ situational awareness) Improve the network-wide ops reliability

Questions?