Aerodrome Traffic Support with the Use of Infrastructure-to-Vehicle Communication

Increasing air traffic imposes the need to seek for solutions improving airport capacity. The standard approach is to expand the infrastructure. However, this is costly and time-consuming. This is why solutions increasing the capacity merely by changing the organization of aerodrome traffic are sought. The purpose of this paper is to present a new concept involving the optimization of braking on the runway. Standard braking profiles can be inefficient because of many possible disturbances and uncertainties. By applying the concept of infrastructure-to-vehicle communication it is possible to modify the standard braking profile so as to reach the desired speed in the vicinity of the runway exit and at the same time to not extend the runway occupancy time. Preliminary version of braking profile adjustment algorithm has been developed and implemented into the ACPENSIM simulator, built as hierarchical, coloured Petri net. Results for the simulation of the scenario where an aircraft touches down in a different place than it was planned and has a different mass, show the effectiveness of the algorithm. Modified braking profile allowed for achieving the appropriate final velocity with almost unchanged runway occupancy time, which determines the capacity of the airport.