Limiting the impact of aircraft turnaround inefficiencies on airport and network operations: The TITAN project

Different airport performance review studies identify aircraft turnaround as the major driver of departure delays that affect efficient airport and air traffic management (ATM) network operation. To mitigate such inefficiencies, reliable information sharing between all involved stakeholders as well as between them and the network manager is necessary. Analysing in depth the current environment and building on the airport collaborative decision-making concept, the ‘Turnaround Integration in Trajectory and Network’ (TITAN) project proposes an advanced concept of operations to identify improvement opportunities in the information flows between the various stakeholders as well as the potential influence of external processes still to be considered and to integrate the aircraft turnaround process into the aircraft business trajectory and the ATM network. After its successful validation, the proposed concept was realised by developing a decision-support tool that was subject to a cost-benefit analysis. It defined a service-oriented architecture that enhances sharing of a more predictive common awareness of all relevant influences on aircraft turnaround as a means of facilitating more predictable and intelligent decision making to mitigate turnaround delays and ameliorate airport performance. Considerations about how to integrate the project output into the existing ATM system and manage the transition to a future TITAN environment were also made. The project output is summarised in this paper.