Development of an Integrated Agent for Greener Airport Operations

In the past few decades, air traffic problems at major airports have been increased significantly, which imposes a high requirement for more efficient cooperation across all airport operations. Thus, determining efficient airport operations is an important and critical problem for airports, airlines, passengers and other stakeholders. In this situation, the complexity of the problem means that advanced decision support systems are needed to guarantee efficient airside airport operations and to mitigate the environmental impact. Previously, most of the research focused on individual airport operational optimisation, rather than an integrated method due to complexity of the problem to solve the conflicts between each area. The research Integrating and Automating Airport Operations has the main driver to decrease any detrimental effects of airport operations upon the environment, such as investigate the trade-off between the total taxi time and fuel consumption for greener solution, which is funded by EPSRC and focuses on the Manchester Airport. This paper focuses on developing an integrated agent to provide a platform for combining gate allocation, ground movement and fuel consumption, to build a computer simulation of the airport problem solving environment.