AN INITIAL ASSESSMENT OF BENEFITS FOR NOISE-AWARE DECISION-SUPPORT TOOLS

Brian Capozzi, Stephen Augustine, Terence R. Thompson, and John E. Robinson, III

Abstract

A current trend in Air Traffic Management
research is the development of decision support tools to
aid in the sequencing and scheduling of terminal area
and en route traffic as a means of increasing overall
capacity and efficiency of operation. What is emerging
as an increasingly important factor for terminal
operations, however, is the environmental impact Ð in
particular that of noise exposure. Thus, Ònoise-awareÓ
decision support tools are needed so that the decision
process includes consideration of noise exposure levels,
particularly for the population within the immediate
vicinity of the airport. This paper describes two
elements of our on-going work in this direction. We
first present results from simulation of the effects of
noise-aware decision support tools at four U.S. airports
having drastically different features and constraints.
These results indicate the potential for noise-aware
decision support tools to significantly improve noise
exposure profiles. We also discuss the means by which
a newly developed noise-aware decision support tool,
the Noise Avoidance Planner, is incorporating a noise
figure of merit into real-time, dynamic determination of
sequencing and routing information. This work
complements the simulation study, and provides
additional indications of the benefits of including noise-awareness
in terminal area decision support tools.