Taxiway Aircraft Traffic Analysis at George Bush Intercontinental Airport (SWUTC/11/476660-00029-1)

Serving one of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States, the George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH) is among the 10 airports with the longest average taxi-out and taxi-in times. The first part of this report assesses the congestion at IAH by analyzing taxi times and flight data during different hours of the day. The capacity of IAH is investigated by examining the number of departing flights on the ground. It reveals that IAH is operating close to the capacity most of the time. Since increasing airport capacity can mitigate the congestion, the second part of this report develops a surface operation model based on the analyzed results to achieve this aim. A mixed integer programming formulation is proposed to optimize the total taxi times by finding the optimal taxi routes and the related schedules. Afterwards, the model is applied to a sample from real data.