Decision Support Tool for Predicting Aircraft Arrival Rates from Weather Forecasts

258 Pages·2008·16.05 MB·English

DECISION SUPPORT TOOL FOR PREDICTING AIRCRAFT
ARRIVAL RATES FROM WEATHER FORECASTS
by
David A. Smith
A Dissertation
Submitted to the
Graduate Faculty
of
George Mason University
In Partial fulfillment of
The Requirements for the Degree
of
Doctor of Philosophy
Information Technology
Committee:
Dr. Lance Sherry, Dissertation Director
Dr. George Donohue, Committee Member
Dr. Rajesh Ganesan, Committee Member
Dr. Andrew Loerch, Committee Member
Dr. Aimee Flannery, Committee Member
Dr. Daniel Menasce, Associate Dean
for Graduate Studies and Research
Dr. Lloyd J. Griffiths, Dean, The Volgenau
School of Information Technology and
Engineering
Date: Spring Semester 2008
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA
Decision Support Tool for Predicting Aircraft Arrival Rates from Weather Forecasts
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy at George Mason University
By
David A. Smith
Master of Science
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 2000
Bachelor of Science
United States Military Academy, 1990
Director: Dr. Lance Sherry, Professor
Department of Systems Engineering and Operational Research
Spring Semester 2008
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA
Copyright (cid:13)c 2008 by David A. Smith
All Rights Reserved
ii
Dedication
I dedicate this dissertation to my wife and best friend Jeanine, my buddy and son Gunner,
and my princess and daughter Madeline.
iii
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my wife Jeanine for supporting me through an 18 year Army career.
I have received many opportunities while she has taken care of the home and the children.
Although I have written and been published, her work has led to the lasting legacy that is
our wonderful children. I would also like to thank the United States Army for providing
me with an outstanding military and civilian education. I only hope that I can live up to
the expectations that come with this opportunity.
Two years ago I was in search of a topic for this dissertation. I went to a talk by Dr.
David Rodenhuis which introduced me to aviation weather. Our early conversations led
to this research and introduction to Dr. George Donohue, the Director of the Center for
Air Transportation System Research (CATSR). Dr. Donohue introduced me to air traffic
management and the problems facing the National Airspace System (NAS). We discussed
potential topics and traded ideas on how to improve air traffic flow. He also introduced
to me to the Executive Director of the CATSR Lab, Dr. Lance Sherry. I owe almost
everything I know about air traffic management to Dr. Sherry. He eventually agreed to
be my dissertation director and has helped me focus my research to go beyond merely an
academic document to one that could be used by the airline industry and the air traffic
managers.
It is a pleasure to have Dr. Rajesh Ganesan, Dr. Andrew Loerch, and Dr. Aimee
Flannery on my committee as well. I appreciate the time and effort they set aside to help
me complete this dissertation.
iv
Table of Contents
Page
List of Tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . x
List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xii
Abstract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiv
1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1 Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.3 Research Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.4 Objectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.5 Contribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.5.1 Uniqueness of Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.5.2 Benefits of Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.5.3 Structure of Dissertation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2 Review of Prior Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.1 Airport Arrival Inefficiencies and Delay Reduction Strategies . . . . . . . . 8
2.1.1 Airport Arrival Inefficiencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.1.2 Delay Reduction Strategies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.2 Reroute Around Weather . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.2.1 Dynamic Strategy Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.2.2 Controller Workload Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.2.3 Route Optimization Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.3 Forecast Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.4 Weather Trends and Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.5 Delay Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.5.1 The Interactive Weather Brief . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.5.2 Surface Conditions and Runway Configurations . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.5.3 Regression Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.5.4 Bayesian Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
2.5.5 Histogram Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2.5.6 Tree and Clustering Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
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2.6 Literature Review Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
3 Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
3.1 Military Decision Making Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
3.1.1 Military Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
3.1.2 Air Traffic Management Intelligence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
3.1.3 Planning Components . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
3.1.4 Planning Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
3.1.5 Decision Point Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3.2 Weather Delay Prediction Tool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
3.3 Data Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
3.3.1 Ground Delay Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
3.3.2 Terminal Aerodrome Forecast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
3.3.3 Aircraft Arrival Rates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
3.3.4 Delay Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
3.4 Support Vector Machines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
3.5 Proposed Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
3.5.1 Creating the TAF Vector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
3.5.2 Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
3.6 Alternative Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
3.6.1 Duality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
3.6.2 Nonlinear Hyperplane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
3.6.3 Modified Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
3.7 Performance Measures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.7.1 Evaluation of Binary Classifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.7.2 Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
4 Philadelphia Case Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
4.1 Philadelphia International Airport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
4.1.1 Philadelphia Airport Layout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
4.2 Linear Support Vector Machine Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
4.2.1 Philadelphia Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
4.2.2 Delay Prediction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
4.3 Dual Formulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
4.3.1 Dual Formulation Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
4.3.2 Nonlinear Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
4.4 Evaluation of Alternate Classification Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
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4.5 Least Squares Regression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
4.5.1 Least Squares Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
4.5.2 Least Squares Result . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
4.6 k-Nearest Neighbor Algorithm. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
4.6.1 Nearest Neighbor Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
4.6.2 Nearest Neighbor Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
4.7 Recursive Partitioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
4.7.1 Recursive Partitioning Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
4.7.2 Recursive Partitioning Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
4.8 Alternate Method Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
5 Airport Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
5.1 Newark International Airport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
5.1.1 Airport Layout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
5.1.2 Newark Evaluation Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
5.1.3 Newark Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
5.2 Chicago O’Hare International Airport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
5.2.1 Airport Layout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
5.2.2 O’Hare Evaluation Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
5.2.3 O’Hare Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
5.3 Atlanta Hartsfield International Airport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
5.3.1 Airport Layout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
5.3.2 Atlanta Evaluation Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
5.3.3 Atlanta Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
5.4 LaGuardia Airport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
5.4.1 Airport Layout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
5.4.2 LaGuardia Evaluation Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
5.4.3 LaGuardia Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
5.5 John F. Kennedy International Airport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
5.5.1 Airport Layout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
5.5.2 JFK Evaluation Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
5.5.3 JFK Airport Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
5.6 Ronald Reagan National Airport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
5.6.1 Airport Layout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
5.6.2 Reagan National Airport Evaluation Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
5.6.3 Reagan National Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
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5.7 Dulles International Airport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
5.7.1 Airport Layout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
5.7.2 Dulles International Airport Evaluation Method . . . . . . . . . . . 113
5.7.3 Dulles International Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
6 Strategies for the Delay Tool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
6.1 Hub and Spoke Operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
6.1.1 Concept of the Reliever Hub . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
6.1.2 Integrating the TAF Delay Tool into the Reliever Hub Concept . . . 123
6.1.3 Example Planning Day . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
6.2 Skip-Stop Operations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
6.2.1 Southwest Airlines Operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
6.2.2 Float Plane Operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
6.2.3 Example Float Plane Scenario . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
6.3 Air Traffic Control System Command Center Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
6.3.1 Mission Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
6.3.2 Decision Point Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
6.3.3 Plan Refinement, Distribution, and Execution . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
6.3.4 Sample Planning Day . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
7 Conclusions and Future Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
7.1 Weather Delay Prediction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
7.2 Support Vector Machines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
7.2.1 SVM Disadvantages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
7.2.2 Future Work on SVMs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
7.3 Air Traffic Management Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
A Appendix A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
B Appendix B. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
C Appendix C. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
D Appendix D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
E Appendix E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
F Appendix F . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
G Appendix G . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
H Appendix H . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
I Appendix I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
I.1 AAR 48 at 0800 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
I.2 AAR 52 at 0800 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
viii
I.3 AAR 48 at 1200 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
I.4 AAR 52 at 1200 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
I.5 AAR 48 at 1600 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
I.6 AAR 52 at 1600 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
I.7 AAR 48 at 1800 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
I.8 AAR 52 at 1800 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
J Appendix J . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
J.1 Philadelphia Prediction Vector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
J.2 Newark Prediction Vector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
J.3 O’Hare Prediction Vector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
J.4 Atlanta Prediction Vector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218
J.5 LaGuardia Prediction Vector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
J.6 JFK Prediction Vector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
J.7 Reagan National Prediction Vector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
J.8 Dulles Prediction Vector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
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