Computerised airport procedures

Researchers at Nottingham University are developing a computerised approach to airport procedures that they claim will lead to faster and greener operations.

The project, which has received just short of £700,000 of funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), aims to computerise and coordinate four key areas of airport operations. These include scheduling for aircraft take-off and landing, baggage handling and gate assignment.

Currently, these processes are organised manually and run in isolation, which increases the risk of difficulties occurring in one operation that go on to affect another. Researchers hope to overcome this difficulty by collecting the information for these activities into a search engine that will be able to analyse the billions of possible scheduling combinations.

The analyses will then narrow down the options to the best possible scheduling combinations and send this to the controllers for review.

As well as reducing delays, the improvements in scheduling are expected to minimise pollution by cutting down the time planes are running their engines on the ground.