Network-based simulation of aircraft at gates in airport terminals

Simulation is becoming an essential tool for planning, design, and management of airport facilities. A simulation of aircraft at gates at an airport can be applied for various periodically performed applications, relating to the dynamic behavior of aircraft at gates in airport terminals for analyses, evaluations, and decision supports. Conventionally, such simulations are implemented using an event-driven method. For a more efficient simulation, this paper proposes a network-based method. The basic idea is to transform. all the sequence and constraint relations of aircraft at gates into a network. The simulation is done by calculating the longest path to all the nodes in the network. The effect of the algorithm of the proposed method has been examined by experiments, and the superiority of the proposed method over the event-driven method is revealed through comprehensive comparisons of their overall simulation performance.