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Projecte llegit

Títol: Study of Ground delay programs and Speed reduction strategies

Estudiants que han llegit aquest projecte:

Director/a: DELGADO MUÑOZ, LUIS

Departament: EETAC

Títol: Study of Ground delay programs and Speed reduction strategies

Data inici oferta: 10-02-2012     Data finalització oferta: 10-10-2012


Estudis d'assignació del projecte:
    Tipus: Individual
     
    Lloc de realització: EETAC
     
    Segon director/a (UPC): PRATS MENÉNDEZ, XAVIER
     
    Paraules clau:
    ground delay program, gdp, speed reduction, fuel consumption
     
    Descripció del contingut i pla d'activitats:
    The student will analyse the Ground Delay Programs of a whole year in the United States. From this study, he extract the main parameters (duration, cancellation time, reason, etc). He should be able to determine the airports more susceptible to imposes a GDP, the main reasons and its characteristics.

    He will also analyse the most common behaviour of the airlines to the delay. Which are the messages that are interchanged between the airlines and the GDP system, and how the Collaborative Decision Making process is done.

    Finally, if it is considered necessary, the student will analyse new techniques to deal with GDP like the speed reduction during the cruise and analyse some fitting functions to the delay and the time that can be recovered if the regulation is cancelled.

     
    Overview (resum en anglès):
    The Ground Delay Program (GDP) and the Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) concepts have been studied in this project. A statistical analysis on all GDPs that occurred during 2006 in the United States of America has been done. Some statistics have been derived on the number of GDPs, their causes, the assigned delay and the number of affected flights per airport Results show that the 90% of the GDPs took place in only 16 airports, being Newark (EWR), in New York, the airport with more regulations. In addition, the 74% of the GDPs were caused by bad weather conditions and the 90% of the total delay was assigned only in 10 airports, being Chicago the airport with more delay assigned. A same behaviour was observed with the number of affected flights: the 90% of the flights had as a destination only 10 different airports and Chicago again, was the airport with more affected flights. A clear relationship exists between the number of affected flights and the assigned delay. However, many airports with more flights and delay are also in the highest positions of the number of GDPs per airport list.

    Using the K-means algorithm GDPs have been classified into clusters with similar characteristics. Cluster centroids for Newark (EWR) have been used to simulate a cruise speed reduction strategy aiming to absorb part of the assigned GDP delay airborne, by flying slower but consuming the same amount of fuel than in the nominal flight. In case the GDP is cancelled, aircraft flying at reduced speed can fly recover some delay, by speeding to the nominal speed, but without incurring with extra fuel consumption.

    The data from the Enhanced Traffic Management System (ETMS) has been used in order to simulate the traffic with destination EWR in two 2006 days. All aircrafts types has been classified into Airbus types and their performances have been computed using the Airbus PEP Suite. Finally, the traffic has been simulated using the Future ATM Concepts Evaluation Tool (FACET).

    The simulation results showed that the speed reduction effects depend on the cancellation time and the number of flights flying at that time. Results show that between 4% to 5% of the total delay can be absorbed in the air. Simulating the Newark GDPs, using the centroids data and cancelling them at their average cancellation time, a 7% of delay can be recovered in the cluster 1 using the speed reduction strategy, 33% in the cluster 2 and 31% in the cluster 3 at no extra fuel consumption.

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