Assessment of Segmented Standard Taxi Route Procedure to Integrate Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems at Civil Airports using Fast- Time Simulations

The introduction of unmanned aircraft systems into various domains of civil aviation led to the necessity to develop suitable integration concepts to coordinate flight movements of manned and unmanned aircraft especially regarding surface operations at civil airports. These remotely piloted or automatic / autonomous unmanned aircraft do not have the same capabilities as manned aircraft. However, to achieve a wide commercial success, they will have to use the same infrastructure. Air traffic control has to maintain a safe, orderly and expeditious flow of air traffic, considering this new mixed traffic constellation. In order to do so, new operational procedures were defined. Within the scope of the SESAR 2020 project `Surface Management Operations' (SuMO), a procedural concept for ground movements of unmanned aircraft together with manned aircraft has been developed and evaluated in gaming sessions. This concept introduces so-called segmented standard taxi routes as a first and easy solution to enable mixed traffic while maintaining the same level of safety and very low system requirements for unmanned aircraft systems. In 2017, this concept was successfully validated in a dedicated workshop with operational experts, air traffic controller, remote and conventional pilots. The results of this evaluation have been published at the 37th Digital Avionics Systems Conference in September 2018. Based on this success, a fast-time simulation has been conducted in the beginning of 2019 to investigate quantitatively the operational performance of this solution in terms of the key performance areas capacity, efficiency and environmental impact. According to project objectives, the simulation scenarios were set up using as example the international airport of Stuttgart. Towing operations were used as a baseline scenario for RPAS ground movements. Selected performance parameters were then compared with those being calculated for the application of the segmented standard taxi route procedure in the solution scenario. The share of remotely piloted aircraft systems varied between 0% and 50% of the whole traffic. This paper provides a detailed description of the setup of this fast-time simulation, conducted simulation runs, defined metrics and results. In addition, these results are correlated with the recently published outcomes of the validation workshop of 2017. The paper closes with a summary and an outlook.