NASA Ames Aviation Systems Division: Surface Highlights FY13

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Surface Highlights - Fiscal Year 2013

Photo of SARDA's interface showing taxiways and runway queues and aircraft icons along each.

The Spot and Runway Departure Advisor (SARDA)

The Airport Surface research team had an extremely productive year, nurturing collaborations with airline research partners and international research laboratories while accomplishing development activities towards more human-in-the-loop (HITL) simulation testing. SARDA (Spot and Runway Departure Advisor), an innovative technology for optimal surface traffic sequencing, continues to be the focus of much of the technical development, as well as the Surface Operations Simulator and Scheduler (SOSS), a fast-time capability to evaluate potential surface algorithms.

Screenshot of the Surface Operations Simulator and Scheduler showing the Charlotte Airport ramp area

Screenshot of the Charlotte-Douglas International Airport ramp area in the Surface Operations Simulator and Scheduler (SOSS)

In April 2013, NASA and US Airways signed a Nonreimbursable Space Act Agreement to jointly build and test a prototype decision-support tool for ramp operators at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport (CLT). Under the Agreement, formally kicked off in June 2013, SARDA functions will be adapted to CLT operations, and NASA and US Airways will jointly develop a customized SARDA User Interface. US Airways may see reduced direct operational costs through decreased taxi delays and fuel usage and may also gain better connection of passengers and baggage, with more predictable service times for departing flights. Benefits are also anticipated for the FAA through enhanced efficiency and predictability of surface operations, which in turn is expected to improve the efficiency and predictability of the National Airspace System. US Airways agreed to provide staff to participate in the critical design reviews for the next several SARDA simulations.

Ames surface researchers held two sets of workshops at Ames with CLT surface subject matter experts (SMEs) (October 2012 and July 2013) including retired ATC tower controllers and Traffic Management Coordinator/Supervisors and US Airways ramp controllers and pilots. The SMEs provided detailed information about CLT surface operations and their roles and responsibilities from their different perspectives. The information gathered from the workshops were used for modeling airport operations and designing ramp controller automation for improved push-back operations and will aid researchers in formulating the scheduler function of SARDA.

In August 2013, the Division hosted a group of researchers from the Deutsche Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR, the German Aerospace Center) for a three-day workshop, supporting NASA's and DLR's formal agreement (signed in December 2012) to collaborate in surface management research. During the workshop, the teams brainstormed and discussed in detail plans to create a common integrated concept of surface management, compared concepts and technologies for surface management between the US and Europe, and identified commonalities and differences in operational procedures and traffic management concepts. The teams completed the first version of a joint concept document titled “A Mid-Term Harmonized Concept for Airport Surface Operations” that was delivered in mid-November 2013.

This image shows a semi-circle (open-side up), four different sets of colored lines starting from points along the bottom of the semi-circle and leading to the bottom right corner of the image representing a taxiway spot, and a puck-like robot representing an aircraft. The first set of trajectories starts at the bottom-left of the semi-circle and shows that the robot backed up in a curve to the left before proceeding to the taxiway spot. The second set of trajectories sharts in the bottom center of the semi-circle and shows that the robot backed up in a curve to the left before proceeding to the taxiway spot. The third set of trajectories also begins at the center and shows that the robot backed up to the right before proceeding to the taxiway spot. The fourth set of trajectories begins at the bottom-right of the semi-circle and shows that the robot backed up in a curve to the right before proceeding to the taxiway spot.

A fraction of experimentally recorded trajectories in a layout of the scaled-down ramp area and an E-puck robot

SARDA's technical work continued with researchers completing the data analysis of the FY2012 surface HITL simulation, whose results were presented at ATM 2013. Aviation Systems Division researchers also visited John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) and CLT to gain a broader understanding of airport surface operations. Finally, NASA also collaborated with the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) to research the structure of surface traffic conflicts and their resolutions by using E-puck robots to model arrival and departure trajectories in the ramp area. Results may be integrated with SARDA in future explorations of airport ramp layouts. Researchers also completed a validation of SOSS, and demonstrated that SOSS accurately models and represents real-world airport surface operations in terms of runway throughput and taxi time.

In addition to the ATM 2013 paper, the SARDA team presented 7 other technical papers at the AIAA Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) and Aviation 2013 conferences as well as the International Symposium on Aviation Psychology. Another paper on the first SARDA HITL simulation results was published as a NASA technical memorandum.

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Last Updated: November 7, 2018

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