The University of Lincoln is leading a project to improve aircraft routing and scheduling at airports, an endeavour that could increase operations at some airports by 50 per cent.
Funded by EPSRC, the new TRANSIT (Towards a Robust Airport Decision Support System for Intelligent Taxiing) project will see researchers and industry experts working together for three years to develop a new on-the-ground system that will reduce aeroplane taxi times, operating costs and environmental impact at airports around the world.
Airport taxiing operations have been identified as a major contributor to unnecessary fuel burn and a substantial source of pollution. TRANSIT research will have the potential to increase airport capacity, while reducing the environmental impact of the growing aviation sector.
The project is in collaboration with the Universities of Sheffield, Stirling, and Cranfield University, plus industry partners that include Rolls Royce, Air France KLM, BAE Systems, Manchester Airport and Zurich Airport.
Dr Jun Chen, an expert in artificial intelligence and control systems from the University of Lincoln’s School of Engineering and principal investigator for TRANSIT, said: “There is an imminent need to make better use of existing aviation infrastructure as air traffic is predicted to increase 1.5 times by 2035.
“Ensuring efficient movement of aircraft on the ground is a key way to save time, reduce costs and improve carbon emissions, so the critical problem we need to address is the balancing of these conflicting objectives.
“By modelling aircraft and their movements more accurately, we believe that highly efficient taxi routes can be generated while still maintaining safety standards.”
Dr Michal Weiszer, research co-investigator for TRANSIT and Research Fellow at the University of Lincoln, and Dr Chen, have previously published research into ways of calculating the quickest and most fuel efficient routes for moving aircraft on the ground.
The TRANSIT project will build on this work and produce a new algorithm to quickly calculate the most suitable route for guiding aircraft from one location to another, using data from airports around the world. Once it has been built, the algorithm will then be tested by pilots using a simulator at Cranfield University. It is hoped that the TRANSIT system will eventually be adaptable for different sized airports worldwide, and could eventually pave the way for automated taxiing.
Dr Weiszer said: “Although ground movement represents only a small fraction of the overall flight, the inefficient operation of aircraft engines at taxiing speed can account for a significant fuel burn. This applies particularly at larger airports, where ground manoeuvres are more complex. It is estimated that fuel burnt during taxiing alone represents up to six per cent of fuel consumption for short-haul flights, resulting in 5m tonnes of fuel burnt per year globally.
“This obviously creates a large financial as well as environmental cost, so we hope to build a robust system that will have a significant impact on these figures.”
The TRANSIT research will take into account engine performance, airframe dynamics and uncertainty related to air traffic; all of which are limitations currently ignored when routing and scheduling aircraft.
The University of Lincoln has been awarded more than £394,000 from the total research grant for tasks including the generation of optimal speed instructions for different aircraft, the development of a decision making framework, real-time software implementation, experimental design and piloted trials. The research will commence in July 2016.
There is already a simple way to cut aircraft taxiing fuel to almost nothing, that is to use the exiting pushback tractors (or tugs) to move aircraft around the airport.
At present tugs are used as little as possible, but to cut emissions they would need to be used as much as possible. We can infer that tugs are more expensive to use than aircraft moving using their own engines.
The biggest cost will be the tug drivers. Although the capital cost of tugs will be quite high, they last almost forever (with battery changes every few years), so the cost per aircraft movement will be small.
Everyone is talking about driverless cars. Driverless tugs present a much less difficult engineering problem than cars on the open road. A central system could know where every tug is every second.
So the solution to aircraft wasting fuel taxiing is to make tugs driverless.
This would also fix other problems, such as low speed aircraft collisions on the ground and fog. The reason so many flights are cancelled in fog is because of problems taxiing. Pilots have difficulty seeing other aircraft moving on the ground. They don’t have that issue in the air (including take-off and landing), because they know their path is clear.
The added ground traffic of the tugs introduces complexity to ground movement of aircraft with safety and turn around time impacts that are negative for airport capacity utilization rates
Would there be any value in the deployment of tractor units to collect and transfer aircraft between runways and terminals, so that the aircraft would not have to use its own engines?
(It should be possible to use autonomously guided tractor units in such a controlled environment; it would not be so different from a factory environment where robot tractors move goods around.)
Absolutely simple and ground-breaking efforts: ‘we’ simple plebs in textiles and synthetic fibre manufacture have been using ‘self-directed autonomous’ drones to move completed ‘bales’ of fibre into the warehouse for over 20 years. I can see little difference between what we have done successfully and what is proposed here.
Except that airport operations are more safty critical:)
There has been talk for years of putting an electric motor into the nose wheel of aircraft.
this is true and even with electric motor there is battery that needs to be managed. A good speed and route without too many stop-and-go will still save power. The proposed work is immediately transferrable to electric taxiing. We have more details of the project on our project website: http://www.transitproject.co.uk.
If I recall skills and systems ‘copied’ from Formula I pit-stops has greatly assisted ‘down-time’ reduction in aircraft turn-around, refuelling, etc: and of course Triage in A&E has been similarly assisted. I had a dear boss in the 60s who suggested: “every three years of so, all organisations should review all their procedures.” THAT DOES NOT MEAN THEY MUST be changed: simply looked-at critically. Isn’t that what we Engineers do automatically?
Hi Graham Field,
I think you are right in that the airport does represent a more constraint enviroment where autonomous taxiing may be more viable and relistic comparing to the open public road and driverless cars. The TRANSIT project will be able to move the airport ground movements one step close to this end. If you are interested in getting to know more about the project you can visit the project website at:
http://www.transitproject.co.uk
you can leave your questions and comments and I will be very happy to answer them.
Thanks
Jun
Thanks for the link Jun, I’m sure The Engineer will keep us all up-to-date on the project. Wishing you and your associates ever success. Regards, Graham.
Hi Ian,
No matter it is using a tugs or the current pilot-in-the-loop system, we do need a good decision support system to tell them the speed, the chosen route, etc. The proposed project aims to answer this and provide a more relistic and robust decision support system. Again, I would like to direct your attention to our project website and will be very happy to answer your questions.
www. transitproject.co.uk
Jun
To the advocates of using the tugs, while I don’t in any way decry this method I fear this would reduce the availability of runways if we tow the aircraft to runway. Time would be lost a) disconnecting / connecting the tug at the runway or adjacent to (a manual task, probably not automatable), minimal time loss. b) Vital systems (engine and controls) checks would need to be done at the runway as the taxi time or ‘stand’ time cannot be used to perform these checks, significant time loss.
While tugs save fuel burn so would taxiing on one engine only, however the one engine scenario with optimised routes (TRAnSIT) would still allow vital checks to be performed and only minimal delay at the runway, thus maximum runway utilisation can be achieved.
Having been in military aviation for a good amount of my life, the fuel burned pre-take off can be very significant. One type I worked on this amounted to ~700kg of a ~14,000kg fuel load (5% of total load). OK, military aircraft tend to have longer pre-flight checks than civils and higher burn rates; but if global fuel burn and pollution is being considered we should also consider these aircraft into the figures.
Optimising use of smaller regional airports would also help considerably as typically these smaller airports have lower utilisation rates and shorter taxiing distances.
Perhaps the project as a sideline could look at optimising airport infrastucture such that stands and general airport layout is optimised for energy usage. Its quite energy efficient to move people individually versus a long taxi to suit terminal location. (People generally can walk under own power).
Again harking back to my military aviation time most airfield layouts were optimized to allow all aircraft quick and unhindered access to runways, as quick response to attack required. Look at these WWII and cold war airfields and you will see stand locations around the airfield not centralised. The added benefit is if their is a major incident (fire etc.) assets are protected via natural separation.
(http://www.mboss.f9.co.uk/twinwood/aerial.htm shows a typical WWII airfield, the blind offshoots would be the aircraft parking areas. Hangarage was typically centralised but does not require good quick access to runways. (more modernly https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/RAF+Lossiemouth/@57.7063168,-3.3373639,2360m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x48850c899647106f:0x6c7705c95f5ccdd2!8m2!3d57.7103176!4d-3.3192229 aircraft sites north and south of main runways in hangarettes with almost equal access to runways.)
Geofrey Iason: some fascinating insights in your comments: surely showing the ‘joined-up’ thought process that is possible when ‘out-side the box’ is the prefered option. No-one suggests that there should be any compromise on safety: but as others have opined, are we (those able to view the broad picture) still not asking the right (or the first) questions. “Why are we doing this anyway?”
Interested in your military airport past. I had project(s) to assist in the design of ‘nets’ -very rapidly deployable- at the end of runways if aircraft brakes or ‘drogue shute’s failed. That concept also developed for the Space Shuttle if it had to deploy to an alternative landing site. Are there lessons here for protecting after a problem in the overall movement of aircraft on all types of airports. Your views valued.