Slots System

[valmarus]

When it comes to gates I think it might be interesting to see a little bit of manual management of gates. Something along the lines of:

Leasing options:

Dedicated gate
Shared gate
Dedicated Parking
Shared parking

Management:

While at an airport a plame must ALWAYS be assigned to a gate or a parking slot. No more waiting at airports for free. Management of where a plane is at gate wise is moved to the route screen. The screen will show a list of your gates and parking below each leg of the journey and will show the current usage (as a colour coded bar blocking that time slot [by the minute] with the exact time to time in numerical values inside the bar. One colour for alighting, one for boarding, one for cleaning and one for configuration) plus a tick box for each of "alight at shared gate", "board at shared gate", "wait at shared gate", "clean at shared gate", "clean at shared parking," "wait at shared parking" with the cost fo each shown next to them.

Instead of a single turn around value planes get 3 turn around values. Alighting, Boarding, cleaning.

You manually assign your aircraft to your gates. Gates require a configuration time between each boarding and alighting phase (say 5 mins, I'm not sure what's reasonable. This is for representing reconfiguring the bridge, updating the computer systems for the new flight, etc. The plane doesn't have to be at the gate during configuration times. Perhaps just add the 5 mins AFTER the boarding and alighting slots since this is easier to code wise and it makes little pactical difference if it is applied before or after the slot since it represents minimum time required to reconfigure the gate not the actual time spent configuring it). Boarding and Alighting must take place at a gate.

Alighting and boarding must take place at a gate, but cleaning can take place at a parking slot. Cleaning can also overlap during gate configuration periods if the aircraft isn't moved.

Dedicated parking should be considerably cheaper than gate rental. That way if you have high traffic at an airport and a few planes with high cleaning turn arounds, it makes sense to move them to a parking slot. Also if you have aircraft waiting on the ground for long periods between flights due to scheduling ti also makes sense to move them.

Shared gates and parking will charge by the half hour or part there of instead of per use. The gate configuration time counts towards your usage of time for shared gates. Parking fees again should be priced to justify moving long turn arounds or schedule gaps to parking but leaving short ones at the gate.

There should be a small towing fee and time requirement for moving between parking and gate. The fee is charged each way but should be fairly low. The time should be short also, perhaps 5 mins required in each direction. Cleaning can't happen during towing but the plane counts as occupying no space on either the gate or the parking. These small time and monetary penalties should again aim to encourage leaving short turn arounds at the gate but long turn arounds and schedule gaps to be parked.


Not only would this add interesting management elements to the game but also some new startegies. Is it worth buying parking at another airport or is it better to buy the parking at your home airport and place any large schedule gap there? Is a turn around long enough to justify parking or should I leave the plane at the gate? Will the 10 min (5 + 5) towing time increase the turnaround long enough to justify leaving the plane at the gate? Is waiting at a shared gate cheaper than paying the towing and rental fees for share parking?

I think it would also future proof the game if you're plannign to add maintenance. You can require the plane to be at parking for minor maintenance such as A checks and add hangar rental and hangar schedule slots also. It would also lay the ground work for changing from a route system to a aircraft timetable system if that's something you're considering also. Creating a route would create the time blocks to be assigned to aircraft instead of assigning an aircraft to a route, allowing for 7 aircraft 7 days scheduling and also flight hour based maintenance and depending on whether you want to do 7 day aircraft schedules or 28 day schedules you can require a min consecuative hours parked for an A check once every 7/28 days.

[palmertae]

Also, there should also be a fee per the hour for when an aircraft is sitting at the airport doing nothing, IRL airlines have to pay a fee everytime they have an idle aircraft on the ground. This can really cut some of these unrealistic profit margins

[lolliftw]

I was thinking that the slot system and gates should be 2 different mechanisms all together.

IRL different airlines are allocated slots in the airport separately from how they are allocated gates. Depending from country to country, airport to airport, the way it is allocated is slightly different. Some allocate slots to the airlines in order for them to plan flights to arrive and depart at those regulated slots. Some, allocate slots when airlines submit plans to operate certain flights at different timings, then schedule the flights and slots based on the current departure/arrival schedule of the airport. Nevertheless, it shouldn't be that 1 gate = 10 slot or something. Sometime it really depends on each and every aircraft's turnover time and how long they remain on the ground, etc.

Even if 2 airlines have same number of slots, the way they utilise their slots may affect how many gates they have, and their operational costs. For example, many full-service airlines like AA, United, Etihad, etc. utilise a banked hub system. This means that at a certain times a huge number of gates are used, as flights arrive and depart in fixed periods. For this system, as more gates are used, more ground staff is required to handle the passengers and the luggage, so more money is to be spent. On the other hand, for budget airlines like SWA, Easyjet, Air Asia, etc., they allow flights to come as and when and depart whenever they like to, so therefore, they would have less gates at the same time, so their operating costs are lower as once one flight departs, the ground staff will move to serve the next arriving flight, etc. This system also utilises way less gates than on a banked hub system.

As for whether it is a shared gate or dedicated, I think the difference is on whose ground crew is operating the gate. Some airlines work with their partner airlines to share gates overseas (for instance SQ uses China Southern ground crew in Shanghai and Air China ground crew in Beijing). In that case they do pay slightly more as they pay those airlines for their crew and ground handling system. On the same note, deciding how much an airline pays probably has to depend on which airport. If they have their own ground handling is probably smaller; similarly if they are at their home airport they probably get a discount etc.

---

When it comes to gates I think it might be interesting to see a little bit of manual management of gates. Something along the lines of:

Leasing options:

Dedicated gate
Shared gate
Dedicated Parking
Shared parking

Management:

While at an airport a plame must ALWAYS be assigned to a gate or a parking slot. No more waiting at airports for free. Management of where a plane is at gate wise is moved to the route screen. The screen will show a list of your gates and parking below each leg of the journey and will show the current usage (as a colour coded bar blocking that time slot [by the minute] with the exact time to time in numerical values inside the bar. One colour for alighting, one for boarding, one for cleaning and one for configuration) plus a tick box for each of "alight at shared gate", "board at shared gate", "wait at shared gate", "clean at shared gate", "clean at shared parking," "wait at shared parking" with the cost fo each shown next to them.

Instead of a single turn around value planes get 3 turn around values. Alighting, Boarding, cleaning.

You manually assign your aircraft to your gates. Gates require a configuration time between each boarding and alighting phase (say 5 mins, I'm not sure what's reasonable. This is for representing reconfiguring the bridge, updating the computer systems for the new flight, etc. The plane doesn't have to be at the gate during configuration times. Perhaps just add the 5 mins AFTER the boarding and alighting slots since this is easier to code wise and it makes little pactical difference if it is applied before or after the slot since it represents minimum time required to reconfigure the gate not the actual time spent configuring it). Boarding and Alighting must take place at a gate.

Alighting and boarding must take place at a gate, but cleaning can take place at a parking slot. Cleaning can also overlap during gate configuration periods if the aircraft isn't moved.

Dedicated parking should be considerably cheaper than gate rental. That way if you have high traffic at an airport and a few planes with high cleaning turn arounds, it makes sense to move them to a parking slot. Also if you have aircraft waiting on the ground for long periods between flights due to scheduling ti also makes sense to move them.

Shared gates and parking will charge by the half hour or part there of instead of per use. The gate configuration time counts towards your usage of time for shared gates. Parking fees again should be priced to justify moving long turn arounds or schedule gaps to parking but leaving short ones at the gate.

There should be a small towing fee and time requirement for moving between parking and gate. The fee is charged each way but should be fairly low. The time should be short also, perhaps 5 mins required in each direction. Cleaning can't happen during towing but the plane counts as occupying no space on either the gate or the parking. These small time and monetary penalties should again aim to encourage leaving short turn arounds at the gate but long turn arounds and schedule gaps to be parked.


Not only would this add interesting management elements to the game but also some new startegies. Is it worth buying parking at another airport or is it better to buy the parking at your home airport and place any large schedule gap there? Is a turn around long enough to justify parking or should I leave the plane at the gate? Will the 10 min (5 + 5) towing time increase the turnaround long enough to justify leaving the plane at the gate? Is waiting at a shared gate cheaper than paying the towing and rental fees for share parking?

I think it would also future proof the game if you're plannign to add maintenance. You can require the plane to be at parking for minor maintenance such as A checks and add hangar rental and hangar schedule slots also. It would also lay the ground work for changing from a route system to a aircraft timetable system if that's something you're considering also. Creating a route would create the time blocks to be assigned to aircraft instead of assigning  an aircraft to a route, allowing for 7 aircraft 7 days scheduling and also flight hour based maintenance and depending on whether you want to do 7 day aircraft schedules or 28 day schedules you can require a min consecuative hours parked for an A check once every  7/28 days.

Up. This proposal is actually quite good, but probably difficult to implement    This could come up with interesting strategies, such as leaving aircraft overseas to do maintenance and repairs while waiting for their next scheduled flight. IRL a number of airlines like Qantas build hangars in South America so as to do maintenance while waiting for their next flight, as the aircraft arriving in South America does not depart on the same day for them. Also it would fit in a banked hub system which helps in increasing connecting traffic, as they wait for the correct time to depart so as to catch a fixed time period at their hub which shortens connection time.

[Unknown98]

We had a real-time gate usage system but it was disabled due to not being accurate enough. The game used a script that ran every 5 minutes and updated the status of each gate. If your aircraft left the gate at 1:01 the gate would not update until 1:05, so if you had another aircraft land at 1:04 - the gate wouldn't be available. The only way I see a system like that working is to store and keep track of the gate (and slot) usage times in a database, and every time you update a route or make changes to an aircraft's turn time it would have to re-calculate that and update the stored values. I will have to think about it and see if it is something that can be done. But I will say it won't happen before the reset, it would be post-reset or possibly post-release. That kind of goes back to something I mentioned before but got some backlash on - limiting routes to only depart on the 5 min mark. So when creating a route you would select 00:05, 00:10, 00:15 and so on instead of being able to say, "depart at 8:37". It would make managing gate and slot block times much easier.

So does someone mind explaining to me how a separated gates/slots system would work? Would you need both a gate and slots to operate flights? Just one or the other? Would you lease a slots in addition to leasing gates? Excuse my ignorance but I just don't really understand how it all works together.

[airlinemanage]

I have heard departure slot and arrival slot instead of a slot for a gate. Maybe there is...

[lolliftw]

We had a real-time gate usage system but it was disabled due to not being accurate enough. The game used a script that ran every 5 minutes and updated the status of each gate. If your aircraft left the gate at 1:01 the gate would not update until 1:05, so if you had another aircraft land at 1:04 - the gate wouldn't be available. The only way I see a system like that working is to store and keep track of the gate (and slot) usage times in a database, and every time you update a route or make changes to an aircraft's turn time it would have to re-calculate that and update the stored values. I will have to think about it and see if it is something that can be done. But I will say it won't happen before the reset, it would be post-reset or possibly post-release. That kind of goes back to something I mentioned before but got some backlash on - limiting routes to only depart on the 5 min mark. So when creating a route you would select 00:05, 00:10, 00:15 and so on instead of being able to say, "depart at 8:37". It would make managing gate and slot block times much easier.

So does someone mind explaining to me how a separated gates/slots system would work? Would you need both a gate and slots to operate flights? Just one or the other? Would you lease a slots in addition to leasing gates? Excuse my ignorance but I just don't really understand how it all works together.

You don't lease a slot, you apply for a slot at the airport. The airport literally gives you a slot to allow you to land, pick-up/drop-off passengers, and depart. It is supposed to ensure that the runway/airport is not overly congested. 
On the other hand, for airport gates, it really depends. I know of someone who is in charge of airport scheduling at a nearby airport and he tells me that the airport allocates the gates to the airline, but the airline is supposed to have the manpower to operate the gate. Essentially in this system you either provide your own ground crew or you ask a partner airline to supply you a ground crew and you pay them. On the other hand, if I am not wrong (someone who knows better correct me please) for American airports most of the gates are owned by the major airlines at the airport (especially those who have hubs/terminals in the airport) and you need to sub-lease from them...

Honestly I believe it is better that the flights are allowed to leave and arrive at 5 min mark. In reality most airports (I believe US is one of the exception) only have flights scheduled to leave at the 5 min mark and arrive at the 5 min mark. Also like many planes should not be allowed to be scheduled to land at the same time, else the runway will definitely jam...

Further readings/references:
https://www.iata.org/policy/slots/Pages/...lines.aspx
https://www.finavia.fi/en/newsroom/2018/...y-designed

[squaregatescrub]

Also like many planes should not be allowed to be scheduled to land at the same time, else the runway will definitely jam...

This is realistic and another game actually has this feature but could become problematic in my opinion. Imagine starting the game with a big smile on your face only to find out that the older players has already hogged up all the time slots at the "viable" airports. This leaves the new player unable to play with the popular routes.

Just my opinion.

[airlinemanage]

Please aware that landing slot and departure slot exists in almost every airport, but not all airports have dedicated terminals or gates. Hong Kong, Singapore airports are examples, which have common use gates.

To make things simple, there are two common ways that airports lease their gates: One is that airlines lease gates and buy landing and departure slots, with the gate allocation managed by airlines themselves (such as Los Angeles), another is that airlines simply buy landing and departure slots, with parking fee included in landing fee, and gate allocation are not managed by airlines themselves, but the airport (such as Hong Kong). In reality, no one will buy a slot of a gate, but airlines do sub-lease a gate to another airline, if the airport is using the first way to lease their gates.

These are how airports handle scheduled flights, for business jets and general aviation and non-scheduled flights, airports handle them in a different way, so I hope AE players who fly business jets won't complain that its not realistic.

Finally, an off-topic information: In the real world, the allocation of slots is independent from the assignment of traffic rights under bilateral air services agreements. Airlines/aircraft operators need both in order to carry out scheduled commercial operations.

[airlinemanage]

I suggest unk to make aircraft not able to park at a remote gate when there is no gate, because in reality these aircraft have to wait on the taxiway, until there is a gate.

[Unknown98]

So slots are only used to control the timing of takeoffs and departures at airports to ensure the airport is not congested at peak times?

The issue with adding slot limitations to the game goes back to gate limitations and why I didn't add those to the game, I feel it limits the growth potential especially since everybody plays in the same game world. If we had different games with limited number of players then it would work okay but what happens when we have 500 active players? 1000? 2000? I don't see limiting gates or slots as an option then.

I do like the idea of some type of detailed gate usage system with different statuses like alighting, boarding, etc. Keeping track of of the number of aircraft on the ground at the same time and then using that to figure out the required number of gates. Maybe even including leasing out your gates to other airlines when not in use. But that is something for the future.

For now the game is not capable of doing any of those things - so essentially the goal until something like that can be implemented is to come up with a way to manage how many gates are needed at each airport based on the number of flights you have operating out of that airport. I think for now I will keep the system I have as I don't see an easy way of implementing slots "correctly" without going all-out with a brand new gate management system.