Abstract
In this article, a large-scale simulation model of Istanbul Airport has been developed. The aim of the study is to analyze the aircraft arrival and departure operations and to evaluate the efficiency of runway use. Runways often form the bottlenecks of airports and the assessment of their capacity is of great importance for airport management. The study consists of data collection, analysis of data, establishment of the simulation model, verification of the model, design of the model and analysis of the results. Data on arrivals and departures of aircraft at the airport were used as input in ARENATM, a sophisticated discrete event simulation software, to create a runway capacity estimation model by analyzing more than 25 thousand records, including 1 month. The simulation model was created with the arrival, departure and taxi stages of aircraft, which have the most significant impact on capacity, as well as the number of passengers. As a result of the analyzes made, it was estimated whether Istanbul Airport will reach the targeted passenger capacity in 2050. The model appears to be very efficient in evaluating runway capacity.