Successfull Gaming Exercise on Total Airport Management in FP6 project EPISODE-3

The TAM concept, a joint development of the DLR Institute of Flight Guidance (AT-One) and Eurocontrol, which is fully compliant with the SESAR concept for airport operations, defines a collaborative pre-tactical planning process of the major land- and airside airport processes. It is expected that this collaborative planning process will lead to a more efficient use of available capacities especially in predicted critical traffic situations (e.g. poor weather conditions, runway closures or massive delay situations). In the gaming exercise operational experts from three main stakeholders airport, airline and air navigation service provider were confronted with a predicted severe capacity shortfall. Their task was to deal with this predicted situation by means of a collaborative planning process supported by a decision support tool prototype developed at the Institute for Flight Guidance. The experiments have produced some interesting findings about the negotiation process and the specific goals of the stakeholder agents and additional experiments are planned to investigate these further. These results will provide valuable input to current and future research activities in the area of airport operations. AT-Ones control center simulator ACCES provides an ideal experimental environment for operations concepts involving multiple stakeholders and will play an important role in the validation of Total Airport Management as envisioned in SESAR.