Deicing Facility Capacity and Delay Estimation Using ASDE-X Data: Chicago O’Hare Simulation Case Study

Abstract

The main 34 airports in the United States reported 1,792,877 aircraft-minutes of departure delay related to ice and snow conditions in 2019 alone. This delay includes deicing aircraft at a centralized deicing facility, increasing the taxi-out phase. In this study, Airport surface detection equipment, Model X (ASDE-X) data at Chicago O’Hare International Airport (ORD) are used to extract deicing times based on aircraft movements within the centralized deicing facility. Airline-related information is parsed as individual lanes of the deicing facility are controlled by the airlines, determining which lanes a flight can use. The extracted deicing time for each aircraft type is then used to develop a simulation model evaluating the efficiency of the centralized deicing facility. Different queueing scenarios are tested for operational performance improvements. Our results show that if all deicing pads were open to all flights, removing airline control, a first come first served (FCFS) strategy with the pads having individual queues could save 25.1% of the aircraft-minutes spent in the deicing system compared with the currently implemented queueing process (baseline scenario). Removing airline control using a FCFS with a combined queue approach reduced aircraft-minutes by 17.8%. Assigning flights to lanes based on their mean deicing time (slow, medium, and fast groups) increased aircraft-minutes by 1.3% on average. This is the first study in the literature to use ASDE-X data from an airport located in the United States to provide data-driven deicing facility capacities and queueing recommendations.