Comparison of performance between PMS and trombone arrival route topologies in terminal maneuvering area

The contradiction between air traffic capacity and demand exerts congestion and delay, resulting in airspace operating at or above its capacity. This paper proposes a performance comparison of two arrival route topologies in Terminal Maneuvering Area (TMA) with a tailored optimization algorithm, including Point Merge System (PMS) and trombone paradigms. We aim at enhancing the capacity of arrival topologies and efficiently landing more aircraft through identifying which topological route is better suitable for current traffic demands. The problem involves integrating and sequencing arrival operations into the TMA. A mathematical model is developed for which entry times, entry speeds and flight routes are regarded as decision variables. The operation constraints of this optimization modelling correspond to detection of potential conflicts between consecutive aircraft at merging waypoints and on the same link segments, based on the safety separation standards. The objective function is set to minimize the delay and speed deviation for all flights in the optimized system. Because of the highly combinatorial nature of this problem and the non-deterministic polynomial hard (NP-hard), a tailored selective simulated annealing algorithm is proposed to optimally make decisions for the arrival traffic flow. Finally, the validation of our approach has been performed for Ataturk Airport in Turkey, by using 11 different operation scenarios of arrival demands. For lower demands, all aircraft can be positively scheduled, while for more than 80% extra scenarios based on the regular traffic demand, there exist some remaining conflicts for the situations. The results illustrate that, compared with the trombone procedure, PMS paradigm could enhance the arrival capacity and has better performance throughout the arrival procedure. Additionally, more flexible sequence position shift is possible in PMS, and it has the ability to accommodate high-density flight operating environment.