Collaborative Virtual Queue: Benefit Analysis of a Collaborative Decision Making Concept Applied to Congested Airport Departure Operations

Since most major US airports schedule operations close to their maximum capacity, departure operations are very sensitive to uncertainties. Consequently, the stochastic nature of airport departure operations induces long runway queues and congestion on critically saturated taxiways. In this paper, we show how collaborative management of congested departure operations from the ready-to-push-back time to the wheels-off time can potentially yield significant benefits to airlines and the providers of air traffic services. The Collaborative Virtual Queue (CVQ) concept proposes to create departure pushback slots to enable departure flight swapping and prevent overloading the taxiway system. Currently ground congestion, caused by a pushback rate exceeding departure capacity, precludes any flight swapping. The CVQ will redistribute pushback slots fairly while respecting the laissez-faire competitive environment. Results are evaluated using a departure system model which is validated using current data and previous studies. A collaborative concept of operations, such as the CVQ, which holds aircraft away from runway queues when possible not only increases taxiing time predictability, it also enables last-minute intra-airline flight swapping. This gives airlines the flexibility to reorder their flight sequences to conform with their priorities in real-time. These swapping capabilities are illustrated by the trade-off between minimizing the average passenger waiting time and minimizing the inequity between aircraft of the same airline.