Evaluation of Priority Queue Disciplines for Aircraft Operations in NextGen

This paper develops a queueing model for aircraft landings at a single runway under trajectory-based flight operations. The situation is expected to arise in the Next Generation Air Transportation System. Aircraft are assigned scheduled times of arrival, which they meet with some normally distributed stochastic error. The Clark approximation method is employed to derive estimates for the mean and variance of queueing delays. Next, the efficiency of queue disciplines that give priority to aircraft capable of flying 4D trajectories with high precision is investigated. It is found that under certain conditions it is possible to obtain significant delay savings for equipped aircraft, without increasing total delay for the system.