(2000). Various other analytical and simulation models
on several different aspects of ATC are covered in
Odoni et al. (1997).
4.1. Airside Operations
The runway complexes of major airports are among
the scarcest resources of today’s international air
transport system and, barring a drastic change in the
landing and takeoff requirements of commercial aircraft,
will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.
New runways are very expensive to build, require
great expanses of land, and most importantly have
environmental and other impacts that necessitate long
and complicated approval processes with uncertain
outcomes. It is not surprising therefore that one of the
most “mature” areas of transportation science deals
with the modeling of runway operations and, more
generally, airside operations. The products of this
work include both analytical (“mathematical”) models
and simulation tools.
4.1.1. Analytical Capacity and Delay Models.
Analytical models preceded viable simulation tools by
about 20 years. In a landmark paper, Blumstein (1959)
defined the capacity of a runway as the expected
number of movements (landings and takeoffs) that
can be performed per unit of time—typically one
hour—in the presence of continuous demand and
without violating air traffic control separation requirements.
He also presented a model for computing the
capacity of single runways used for arrivals only,
for departures only, and for strings of arrivals followed
by strings of departures. Subsequent generalizations
included the possibility of inserting departures
between successive arrivals, possibly by increasing
(“stretching”) the separation between arrivals
(Hockaday and Kanafani 1972) and the treatment of
some of the parameters of Blumstein’s (1959) models
as random variables, instead of constants (Odoni
1972).
Extensions to cases involving two or more simultaneously
operating runways were also developed at an
early stage—see, e.g., Swedish (1981). The complexity
of multirunway models depends greatly on the
extent to which operations on different runways inter-