Airside Level of Service: Modelling the Influence of Weather Volatility on Runway Operations

Abstract

From the beginning of aviation, weather has been a strong determinant of the service quality of runway operations in terms of throughput and delay and is likely to remain so in the future. Large differences between the runway capacities of different weather situations in combination with the long-term scheduling processes in air traffic can lead to large delays depending on current demand. We introduce a Weather Induced Level of Service (WILoS) to describe the influence of weather volatility on the service level of runway operations using the shares of flights performing better than specified delay thresholds as performance metrics over defined periods of time. We start with METAR messages which historically describe the weather situation on a specific airport location in time steps of 30 minutes over decades and develop a translation of METAR messages into weather dependent runway separation sets and blocking event sets for a generic single runway system. In a second step, time series for the change between these separation and blocking event sets are derived from the corresponding METAR time series of the three airport locations of Hamburg, Stuttgart and Munich over a period of 20 years from 2004 to 2023. The airport specific separation and blocking time series are then combined with a generic repetitive flight schedule for one day in a queuing simulation which is executed over the complete time period and hence the different weather situations. The results from the generic single runway simulation, grouped for summer and winter seasons of the airport locations, are showing considerable differences in WILoS outcomes between airport location averages (e.g. 94% versus 98%), between summer and winter seasons averages at an airport location (e.g. 97% versus 89%) and between the individual years of the period (e.g. 82% versus 97 %), indicated here for the share of flights below a weather caused runway delay of 15 minutes. A main use of the WILoS framework will be the design of requirements for new technical systems and operational improvements to enhance airport capacity with regard to their resilience to weather volatility on the basis of historical weather data and future demand forecasts.