Modeling surface delay due to super heavy transports in a large-scale simulation environment

The super heavy transport is one of the advanced vehicles envisioned in the future aviation systems. Due to its size and operational characteristics, some impact on the surface movements of other conventional vehicles is expected. Current practices regarding Airbus A380 aircraft at some U.S. airports might give us a clue as to how much such an impact would be. We have conducted descriptive analyses on taxi activities at two U.S. airports that currently have A380 operations and investigated the taxi delay of those operations around an A380 operation. Several possible cases are identified where super heavy transport could potentially cause interference with other surface movements. Corresponding models are then proposed to help incorporate the super heavy transport impact on surface movement into a large-scale simulation tool, and these are demonstrated with a hypothetical flight schedule. With the limitation of publicly accessible data sources, suitable statistical methods are applied to quantify the taxi delay due to super heavy transports, which is a necessary input of the proposed models.