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Aviation Logistics and Management, Organization Management.

This case is suitable to be used in advanced undergraduate and MBA/MSc level.

This case highlights the challenges of obtaining “Green Organization” certification process of ICF Airports Antalya. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has initiated a Green Airport project in 2009. The aim of the project is to promote the systematic reduction and, where possible, elimination of the environmental impacts of airport operation. Organizations are required to establish, implement, document, and maintain an environmental management system (EMS) in accordance with the current version of the TS EN ISO 14001 EMS Standards. An annual Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report is required to be prepared in accordance with the TS EN ISO 14064-1 standard, and Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report must be verified by the TSE in accordance with TS EN ISO 14064-3 standard. When an organization meets these requirements, DGCA grants the organization a “Green Company” certificate, which allowed a 20% discount on the extension fee of authorization documents and licenses. Although ICF Airports Antalya faced several challenges, it was issued “Green Organization” certificate by the DGCA in 2010 and finally became 19th greenest airports in the world.

This case illustrates the following:

• the process of Green Company certification in aviation sector;

• the ways to handle challenges of the green organization certification process; and

• the needs for engaging stakeholders in environmental initiatives.

the process of Green Company certification in aviation sector;

the ways to handle challenges of the green organization certification process; and

the needs for engaging stakeholders in environmental initiatives.

Currently, the European air transport system is experiencing an annual growth of 7%. With an increasing number of flights, airports are reaching their capacity limits and are becoming a bottleneck in the system. Mantea is a European Commission funded project dealing with this issue. This paper focuses on planning decision support tools for airport traffic controllers.

The objective of our planning tools is to achieve a better use of the available airport infrastructure (taxiways and runways). To generate a safe plan, many rules must be taken into account that restrict the usage of airport tarmac: international regulations, airport operational procedures, aircraft performance, weather conditions and sometimes even controller “usual practices”. To generate a realistic plan, extensive monitoring of the traffic situation as well as suitable timing must be achieved. In the life cycle of a flight, 11 out of 15 possible causes of delay occur in an interval of 10-20 minutes, between aircraft start-up request and push-back. This means that precise planning before the end of this period is highly improbable. On the other hand, planning after this period implies the need for fast responses from the system.

In the Mantea project, an architecture is proposed in which a co-operative approach is taken towards planning aircraft movements at the airport. Controllers will be supported by planning tools that help assigning routes and departure times to controlled vehicles, in planning runway allocation (departure sequence) and occupancies, and in monitoring plan progress during flight phases. The planning horizon relates to medium term operations, i.e. 2-20 minutes ahead. The Mantea planning tools implement the following functions: runway departure planning, routing, and plan conformance monitoring. The tools will reduce the controller's workload, increase the level of safety for airport surface movements, and reduce the number of delays and operating costs for the airliners.

In this paper, we will focus on the constraint satisfaction programming techniques used in Mantea for (1) runway departure planning, (2) itinerary search and taxi planning functions. The airport tarmac and runway vicinity air routes have been modelled as a graph. Real time constraints have brought us to develop an algorithm linear in complexity for the itinerary search problem. Operational pressure has led us to develop fast search strategies for scheduling (i.e. use of heuristics, hill climbing…).

Over the past 50 years, air travel in the United States has increased from approximately 33 million passengers in 1960 to over 607 million passengers in 2007 (National Transportation Statistics, 2011, Table 1–40). This is over an 18-fold increase in air travel in the past five decades. Over that same time period, the number of airports increased modestly, from 15,161 in 1980 to 19,750 in 2009. The number of those airports serving public commercial traffic is even smaller, and has declined from 730 airports in 1980 to 559 in 2009 (National Transportation Statistics, 2011, Table 1–3). Together, these two facts point to phenomenal growth among airports (measured by the number of passenger trips).