Using airport fast-time simulation models to increase the quality of airport capacity utilization studies

Due to increased travel needs of the world’s population, global air traffic, measured in revenue passenger-kilometers, doubled at least every 15 years. As many airports could not develop their infrastructure at the same rate, airport capacity is increasingly becoming a scarce resource. In order to be able to accommodate future air traffic growth, forecasted by major air traffic system stakeholders, measures have to be developed that increase aircraft respectively, passenger throughput. To evaluate different approaches and analyze the global air transport system, a method has been set up to determine the degree of capacity utilization of airports. Therefore, the airports capacity under instrument meteorological conditions must be determined. Investigations have shown that this approach is applicable to airports using the IATA slot coordination process to manage their demand. This paper presents a method to determine airport capacity and derive realistic traffic distributions that can be used as an input for capacity utilization studies. The simulation tool used for this analysis was Simmod PLUS!. Analysis showed that without applying this method, airport capacity utilization can be significantly underestimated. An example showed that it can be as much as almost 10% higher, if the same standards were applied to all airports.