An ACT-R model of commercial jetliner taxiing

The Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) seeks to reduce gridlock at airports by, among other things, creating a more efficient surface taxi management system. Addressing this situation creates a difficult evaluation problem; how can new scheduling methods be tested? Present methods generally involve either expensive human-in-the-loop experiments or computer simulations that do not adequately represent the human component of system performance. We have developed an ACT-R model of commercial jetliner taxiing with the ultimate goal of aiding in both of these efforts. The X-Plane commercial flight simulation package provides an environment in which the model can act. That environment is populated with aircraft driven by recordings taken of real aircraft at Dallas-Fort Worth airport, which contain the actual positions of all aircraft on the taxi surface for a given time slice. This also provides us with a rich source of data for model validation, as the model can "replace" one actual aircraft, allowing comparisons between model-generated and pilot-generated trajectories.