Current-day metroplex traffic management practices lead to multiple operational shortfalls causing unnecessary surface and airspace delays, underutilization of available metroplex capacity and lack of predictability. Under the ATM Technology Demonstration-2 (ATD-2) subproject, NASA plans to address these shortfalls by demonstrating Integrated Arrival, Departure, Surface (IADS) scheduling technologies and transitioning them for field-implementation. These technologies aim to increase the predictability, efficiency, and throughput of metroplex operations while meeting future air traffic demands. This paper studies the impact of departure miles-in-trail (MIT) restrictions on ATD-2 operations using fast time simulations. The paper also discusses a metroplex departure metering simulation platform developed for supporting this study. Simulation-based analysis outlined in this paper demonstrates that maintaining MIT restrictions at current-day levels while ATD-2 is in operation, may impede the full realization of the benefits from ATD-2. We also demonstrate that relaxing MITs when ATD-2 scheduling is active would save around 1-3% total departure delay (gate + taxi + airborne delay) while retaining a high level of taxi and airborne delay savings over current-day operations, as well as maintaining a level of safety commensurate with current-day operations.
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