Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is the world's busiest airport by passenger volume, overseeing a massive capacity of 106.3 million passengers. However, the airport continues to face major bottlenecks in flight operations; official data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics depicts average arrival and departure delays exceeding an hour. Beyond encroaching schedules, delays at Atlanta come at a cost, as it costs airlines around 100 USD to operate a single flight for one minute. Thus, the airport was modeled into a Python-based (NumPy/SimPy) stochastic discrete event simulation (DES) through Poisson processes and lognormally distributed flight delays. Through combined statistical and graphical analysis to identify the origin of delays, this research identifies an inherent restraint in airport operations; runway initialization queues and runway assignment delays were concluded to be the primary factors that increase flight delays, as evidenced by extreme volatility (CV ~ 61% and 56%, respectively) and high positive skewness (~ 0.96 for both variables). These results indicate a "ripple effect" in the airport system, by which unpredictable extreme outliers in these variables directly cause systemic congestion and, at times, tarmac contention, widening latency. Furthermore, this observation is concluded to not be caused by infrastructural inadequacy, as the research strongly contends that the infrastructural procedures at the airport are stable, thanks to operational reliability (CV ~ 6%). The study also found arriving and departing flights' delays to be statistically independent of each other. Consequently, increasing infrastructural capacity without appropriate modifications in operational procedures risks triggering Braess's paradox in this system. The project proposes a new runway sorting system based on topological flow control through incorporating a heuristic optimization with combinatorics and dynamic load balancing. It is suggested that flights linked to select concourses be made to land according to vector-based segregation of the airport layout, aimed at effectively combating ripple effects and bottlenecks.
Jithish Ranjith Kumar (Wed,) studied this question.