En Route AMAN Design Toward Sustainable Arrival Traffic Operation

A scientifically designed arrival manager (AMAN) for en route airspace, so-called En Route AMAN, is proposed. This AMAN aims to achieve environmental benefits by optimizing runway flow and inter-aircraft control for air traffic controllers (ATCos). First, stochastic distribution of inter-aircraft time and runway occupancy times are analyzed to design an airline-oriented runway assignment rule that selects a target to minimize arrival taxi time in cases of high demand at runway 34L. Second, the direct-to rule is applied to southbound traffic to runway 34R, depending on the volume of traffic from the north to 34R. Third, speed control rules are also formulated based on inter-aircraft spacing, using simulation-based optimization and decision tree analysis to capture stochastic features and the bottleneck of air traffic flow for ATCo in each en route airspace. An agent-based simulation is conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the system in reducing fuel consumption due to arrival delays. The fuel consumption is estimated by using the fuel flow of the representative engine corresponding to the aircraft type sourced from the ICAO databank. The results demonstrate that the proposed En Route AMAN achieves a total fuel saving of 12.58 tons for approach in terminal airspace and 5.23 tons for taxiing per day. These findings suggest that implementing operationally feasible rules for ATCos could mitigate environmental impacts while ensuring interpretability and feasibility.