The continuing growth of air traffic around the world is leading to increasing congestion and ground delays. As airport stakeholders are designing new airport infrastructures and proposing advanced systems and procedures for improving ground operations, an inexpensive tool is needed to evaluate any proposed changes. Thus, simulation tools become essential to validate their choices before operational use. Many modeling tools have been developed over the years, but there is still much room for improvement. This study describes an open, portable, user friendly modeling tool, GreenSim, developed at the George Mason University (GMU) Center for Air Transportation System Research (CATSR). It has a Graphical User Interface (GUI) which allows the user to choose the desired airport to simulate and to define characteristics of airport components, including starting and ending dates that define the arrival and departure schedules and the service times of each segment. To correctly simulate and model all types of airports, GreenSim integrates three functions: 1) data analysis, 2) simulation modeling, and 3) airport performance analysis for delays, fuel, emissions, and operating cost. The paper has validated GreenSim modeling ability with three types of airports considering delays and demand size, and the confidence interval given by GreenSim can cover all real random data sample points from Aviation System Performance Metrics (ASPM) database. Therefore, the paper believes that GreenSim can help airport stakeholders to test what-if scenarios to investigate the impact of new technologies and ATM concepts.
Abstract