Ramp Operations Monitoring System

Abstract

United Airlines (UAL) operations estimates that they spent $1.39 million in flight delay costs last year. The SENSIS Corporation was sponsoring the design of a system that would assist airport ramp personnel in the allocation of ramp resources by physically tracking each resource. Through much research and analysis, our group concluded that a good business case could not be made for SENSIS Corporation. Our main sponsor is now United Airlines. The system design described in this paper is an information, resource tracking, and communications system. The key operational benefits of the system include increased situational awareness for ramp personnel and reduced operating costs. A top-down approach was implemented to design the Ramp Operations Monitoring System (ROMS). Research concerning airport operations was conducted to identify the current problems and inefficiencies with ramp resource allocation. Stakeholder interviews were conducted to generate system requirements. The house of quality methodology was used to identify and define the system's functional and physical architecture. Objectives hierarchies were developed to determine the weighting functions for the system's requirements traceability matrix. A model was developed of the aircraft turn process. A model of daily ramp operations was also developed. Stochastic simulations were performed using the two models by using "Arena" to evaluate the proposed design's overall performance. Arena is a discrete event simulation modeling environment. Preliminary results indicate that a business case can be developed for the system described in this paper. Tracking the aircraft turn process appears to be the critical task of the system.