Department of Civil, Constructional and Environmental Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, 00184 Rome, Italy.
ENAV Ente Nazionale Assistenza al Volo-Italian Air Navigation Service Provider Via Salaria, 00138 Rome, Italy.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2021 Mar 10;18(6):2807. doi: 10.3390/ijerph18062807.
Air traffic controllers aim to optimize airport capacity, that is to increase the number of aircraft movements per hour maintaining a limited delay. There are several definitions of capacity, which depend on the considered airport element. This study focused on the development of a method that allows evaluating the impact of tower air traffic controllers' workload on airport capacity. It adapts a model for the workload of sector controllers designed by Eurocontrol to tower controllers and tests it on a heavily busy international airport. In order to collect controllers' working times, a campaign of data collection has been carried out from the radio frequency occupation. The results allowed us to extrapolate the hourly percentage of work of the various tower controllers using a fast-time simulation software. By imposing an hourly working threshold on tower air traffic controllers, it was possible to obtain a maximum number of manageable aircraft, which was compared with the airside capacity of the airport. The results show that the maximum traffic manageable from the airside would produce unacceptable workload for tower controllers, highlighting the link between airport capacity and the human component.
空中交通管制员的目标是优化机场容量，即在保持有限延误的情况下增加每小时的飞机起降次数。容量有几种定义，这取决于所考虑的机场元素。本研究专注于开发一种方法，该方法可以评估塔台空中交通管制员的工作负荷对机场容量的影响。它适用于欧洲空中航行安全组织（Eurocontrol）为扇区管制员设计的工作负荷模型，并在一个繁忙的国际机场进行了测试。为了收集管制员的工作时间，我们进行了一次从射频占用情况的数据收集活动。结果允许我们使用快速时间模拟软件来推断出各个塔台管制员的每小时工作百分比。通过对塔台空中交通管制员施加每小时工作阈值，可以获得可管理的飞机的最大数量，并将其与机场的滑行道容量进行比较。结果表明，从空中可管理的最大交通量将对塔台管制员产生不可接受的工作量，突出了机场容量和人为因素之间的联系。
