Spatial Modeling of Airport Surface Fuel Burn for Environmental Impact Analyses

The assessment of the fuel burn and emissions impact of airport surface operations is a key part of understanding the environmental impacts of aviation. These assessments are needed at two levels: the analysis of inventories (the total amount of fuel burned and emissions discharged over some period of time), and the analysis of spatial distributions (the amount of emissions experienced at a particular location within or near the airport). While the availability of taxi times for the operations of interest is sufficient for inventory analysis, the analysis of spatial distributions requires estimates of where on the airport surface an aircraft is located as it consumes fuel. In this paper, we show how a data-driven queuing network model can be developed in order to estimate the time that an aircraft spends at different congested locations on the airport surface. These models are useful both for spatial distribution analysis and for predicting taxi times in the absence of measurements (e.g., for projected demand sets). We use measurements of Ultra Fine Particles (UFPs) at Los Angeles International (LAX) airport to demonstrate that the proposed model can help predict the measured emissions at different monitoring sites located in the vicinity of the airport. In the process, we show how one could develop a machine learning model of the spatial distribution of airport surface emissions, given pollutant measurements, air traffic demand, and prevailing weather conditions. Finally, we develop a clustering-based method to evaluate the generalizability of our surface operations modeling framework.