2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Airport taxi times affect operation efficiency and congestion, fuel consumption, and aircraft emissions. Aircraft taxi time refer to the time it takes for an aircraft to move from the gate to takeoff, or to move from landing to the gate. Efforts to better understand and reduce airport taxi times may potentially improve airport capacity and reduce fuel usage, costs, and emissions. Airport Surface Detection Equipment, Model X (ASDE-X) is a surveillance system that provides location and movement information of aircraft and vehicles on the airport to air traffic controllers. ASDE-X was developed to reduce the Category A and B runway incursions at airports by providing continuous information of aircraft and vehicle location on airport movement areas. This equipment was implemented at 35 major U.S. airports.
The FAA defines U.S. airports as Large, Medium, Small, and Non hub airports. In National Plan of Integrated Airport System (NPIAS), the Appendix A: List of NPIAS Airports provides a list of U.S. airports and their hub classifications (Small, Medium, and Large hub). The Aviation System Performance Metrics (ASPM) dataset from the FAA publishes airport and airline operation data of 77 airports in the U.S. In the dataset, the quarter-hour taxi-in time and quarter-hour taxi-out time of the 77 airports are given. In this study, the researchers explore the possible effect of ASDE-X implementation on airport taxi-times at 71 U.S. airports in the ASPM dataset. ASDE-X is installed at 35 airports and not installed in the other 36 airports in the ASPM dataset. In this paper, taxi times for the ASPM airports with ASDE-X are compared to the airports without ASDE-X.
Identifying potential factors affecting airport taxi times may help researchers build better taxi time prediction model and may help airport managers to make better decisions to improve airport efficiency and capacity. Educators may use this research to teach large-sample data collection, data cleaning and consolidation, design of experiment, and statistical and graphical methods to answer research questions in undergraduate engineering courses. Undergraduate aerospace or aviation students may improve their comprehension of taxi times, ASDE-X, and airport operations from this research.