Abstract:
Air travel is rapidly increasing all over the world and airport capacities are crucial when serving
this growing demand. When it comes to airport capacities, whether it is passenger or freight,
runway capacity is the key determining factor among many. At the same time, adding a runway
to an existing airport is an expensive process from the design itself to obtaining approvals,
construction and completion, compared to any other developments associated with an airport
such as passenger areas and other service areas. However, despite the cost and other negative
external factors involved, most airport authorities tend to make a bold decision to add another
runway to the existing airport without looking at optimising existing and future operations.
This seems to be the case for the Bandaranaike International Airport (BIA) which made plans
to add a second new runway to accommodate future traffic.
Therefore, the main aim of this research is to identify how to achieve the optimal expansion of
a single-runway airport without adding a second runway. This is achieved by identifying
critical parameters that affect the runway capacity and analysing ways to obtain the optimal
capacity. Hence, the next appropriate solution to accommodate future traffic growth is to
optimise current operations rather than physical expansion, due to drawbacks such as high
capital costs, long implementation times, community opposition, and so on. After collecting
the necessary data, an analysis was carried out to determine the current capacity and the
utilisation of the runway in BIA. From the analysis, it was found that during a peak period more
than 50% of the runway capacity is idling, meaning that it is been underutilised heavily at
present. In other words, BIA can simply double the operations with the existing runway and
now the question is whether BIA expects a growth more than this within the next 15-20 years.
Beyond finding out the truly available runaway capacity there are ways to optimise runaway
capacities. One such option would be to assist air crafts to evacuate from the runaway in the
shortest possible time so that they can conduct the next operations. This was found to be the
next largest bottleneck hindering runaway capacity and as a result implementation of highspeed
exits have been considered in this study using the REDIM software. In addition, the
best departure and arrival sequences were discovered using Python code to utilise the time
more efficiently as Runway Occupancy Time (ROT) differs according to the aircraft category.
It canbe concluded that the existing runway capacity can be further improved by optimising
the current operations, as ROT was reduced by 10%.
