Evaluation of an Automated Taxi Concept in a Distributed Simulation Environment

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Evaluation of an Automated Taxi Concept in a Distributed Simulation Environment

Kocks, Stephan / Oehme, Astrid / Rad, Tobias / Budweg, Boris / Feuerle, Thomas

Taking into account the actual predictions for the growth of air traffic in Europe in the next 20 years, major hub airports will become more and more the bottlenecks in the overall air transport network. Amongst other factors, current taxi procedures and the dependency on airfield view for both, controllers and flight crews, have a large impact on an airport's efficiency and capacity. The ROLF project (Rollführung, Taxi Guidance), a sub-project of the research project iPort (Innovative Airport) within the scope of the German Aeronautical Research Program (LuFo IV), aimed at operational changes at airports to meet future requirements regarding the arising European airspace demand by introducing an increased level of automation. Following the project's objectives, a concept of operations was developed by the ROLF partners that describes in detail the systems and procedures necessary for automated taxi operations. This paper focuses on a human-in-the-loop evaluation of the operational concept in order to investigate its feasibility and the general acceptance by its users from flight deck perspective. At first, the operational concept is introduced in the context of an Advanced Surface Movement Guidance and Control System (A-SMGCS). A simulation environment spatially distributed over multiple locations in Germany is described, which was the base for the evaluation study. Finally, the conducted simulation study and evaluation results are presented. Several positive effects with regard to automated taxi procedures were observed.