Airports and surrounding airspaces are limited in terms of capacity and represent the major bottleneck in the air traffic management system. This paper proposes a two level model to tackle the integrated optimization problem of arrival, departure, and surface operations. The macroscopic level considers the terminal airspace management for arrivals and departures and airport capacity management, while the microscopic level optimizes surface operations and departure runway scheduling. An adapted simulated annealing heuristic combined with a time decomposition approach is proposed to solve the corresponding problem. Computational experiments performed on real-world case studies of Paris Charles De-Gaulle airport, show the benefits of this integrated approach.
This research aims to find relevant evidence on whether there is a link between air capacity management (ACM) optimization and airline operations, also considering the airline business model perspective. The selected research strategy includes a case study based on Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport to measure the impact of ACM optimization variables on airline operations. For the analysis we use historical data which allows us to evaluate to what extent the new schedule obtained from the optimized scenario disrupts airline planned operations. The results of this study indicate that ACM optimization has a substantial impact on airline operations. Moreover, the airlines were categorized according to their business model, so that the results of this study revealed which category was the most affected. In detail, this study revealed that, on the one hand, Full-Service Cost Carriers (FSCCs) were the most impacted and the presented ACM optimization variables had a severe impact on slot allocation (approximately 50% of slots lost), fuel burn accounted as extra flight time in the airspace (approximately 12 min per aircraft) and disrupted operations (approximately between 31% and 39% of the preferred assigned runways were changed). On the other hand, the comparison shows that the implementation of an optimization model for managing the airport capacity, leads to a more balanced usage of runways and saves between 7% and 8% of taxi time (which decreases fuel emission).
MULTIFILE
In order to stay competitive and respond to the increasing demand for steady and predictable aircraft turnaround times, process optimization has been identified by Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) SMEs in the aviation industry as their key element for innovation. Indeed, MRO SMEs have always been looking for options to organize their work as efficient as possible, which often resulted in applying lean business organization solutions. However, their aircraft maintenance processes stay characterized by unpredictable process times and material requirements. Lean business methodologies are unable to change this fact. This problem is often compensated by large buffers in terms of time, personnel and parts, leading to a relatively expensive and inefficient process. To tackle this problem of unpredictability, MRO SMEs want to explore the possibilities of data mining: the exploration and analysis of large quantities of their own historical maintenance data, with the meaning of discovering useful knowledge from seemingly unrelated data. Ideally, it will help predict failures in the maintenance process and thus better anticipate repair times and material requirements. With this, MRO SMEs face two challenges. First, the data they have available is often fragmented and non-transparent, while standardized data availability is a basic requirement for successful data analysis. Second, it is difficult to find meaningful patterns within these data sets because no operative system for data mining exists in the industry. This RAAK MKB project is initiated by the Aviation Academy of the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Hogeschool van Amsterdan, hereinafter: HvA), in direct cooperation with the industry, to help MRO SMEs improve their maintenance process. Its main aim is to develop new knowledge of - and a method for - data mining. To do so, the current state of data presence within MRO SMEs is explored, mapped, categorized, cleaned and prepared. This will result in readable data sets that have predictive value for key elements of the maintenance process. Secondly, analysis principles are developed to interpret this data. These principles are translated into an easy-to-use data mining (IT)tool, helping MRO SMEs to predict their maintenance requirements in terms of costs and time, allowing them to adapt their maintenance process accordingly. In several case studies these products are tested and further improved. This is a resubmission of an earlier proposal dated October 2015 (3rd round) entitled ‘Data mining for MRO process optimization’ (number 2015-03-23M). We believe the merits of the proposal are substantial, and sufficient to be awarded a grant. The text of this submission is essentially unchanged from the previous proposal. Where text has been added – for clarification – this has been marked in yellow. Almost all of these new text parts are taken from our rebuttal (hoor en wederhoor), submitted in January 2016.
Predictive maintenance, using data of thousands of sensors already available, is key for optimizing the maintenance schedule and further prevention of unexpected failures in industry.Current maintenance concepts (in the maritime industry) are based on a fixed maintenance interval for each piece of equipment with enough safety margin to minimize incidents. This means that maintenance is most of the time carried out too early and sometimes too late. This is in particular true for maintenance on maritime equipment, where onshore maintenance is strongly preferred over offshore maintenance and needs to be aligned with the vessel’s operations schedule. However, state-of-the-art predictive maintenance methods rely on black-box machine learning techniques such as deep neural networks that are difficult to interpret and are difficult to accept and work with for the maintenance engineers. The XAIPre project (pronounce Xyper) aims at developing Explainable Predictive Maintenance algorithms that do not only provide the engineers with a prediction but in addition, with a risk analysis on the components when delaying the maintenance, and what the primary indicators are that the algorithms use to create inference. To use predictive maintenance effectively in Maritime operations, the predictive models and also the optimization of the maintenance schedule using these models, need to be aware of the past and planned vessel activities, since different activities affect the lifetime of the machines differently. For example, the degradation of a hydraulic pump inside a crane depends on the type of operations the crane but also the vessel is performing. Thus the models do not only need to be explainable but they also need to be aware of the context which is in this case the vessel and machinery activity. Using sensor data processing and edge-computing technologies that will be developed and applied by the Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen (Hanze UAS), context information is extracted from the raw sensor data. The XAIPre project combines these Explainable Context Aware Machine Learning models with state-of-the-art optimizers, that are already developed and available from the NWO CIMPLO project at LIACS, in order to develop optimal maintenance schedules for machine components. The resulting XAIPre prototype offers significant competitive advantages for maritime companies such as Heerema, by increasing the longevity of machine components, increasing worker safety and decreasing maintenance costs.
