Airport capacity data are available through many sources such as the FAA Aviation System Performance Metrics (ASPM), the FAA Operational Information System (OIS), and the FAA airport capacity benchmark report. These sources provide departure and arrival capacity data as point values or paretos for some common airport conditions, although capacity varies due to many factors such as runway configuration, meteorological condition, operations mix and other site-specific factors. Analytically modeling the capacity of airports under all these different conditions has limitations. This paper describes a simulation-based approach to estimate airport capacity for any arbitrary set of conditions. This approach uses detailed airport surface operations data to obtain operational characteristics of an airport, such as separation and transit times under different weather conditions and configurations, and uses it in the simulation. In the simulation, we vary the weather condition, runway configuration and operations mix, simulate the operations and compute the maximum throughput an airport can handle under those conditions. Using this approach, we have developed models for 25 major US airports and so far have validated the model for BOS and ATL.
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