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eddl

PSXT Learning: balancing gate vs ramp positions

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Hi,

I am currently learning a lot of airport files on multiple computers 24/7. I plan to share them once completed.

When testing completed airport files I try to balance them using the parking percentage, it varies from 20-40% per airport. So default 30% is already a great starting point.

But I have the issue that gate positions are almost completely full, while apron positions are mostly empty - resulting at completely large empty areas at many airports.

Did you think about adding another user-defined option to balance gate vs ramp positions? Currently it seems about 80% in favour of gate positions, but for many airports 60-70% would be more appropriate. It would be great to manually fine-tune this.

Options in the airport file:

- % parked aircraft (default: 30)

- % gate positions (default: 75) - NEW

 

Many many thanks for your great application, it really gives a new dimension for MSFS flying! 🙂

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24 minutes ago, eddl said:

Did you think about adding another user-defined option to balance gate vs ramp positions?

No, because that will not work. Real live aircraft don't park often at ramp positions, that's why you see not many of them in airport files.

The only think you could do is to add some manually.

 

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Thanks for your reply!

You mean that the ratio of gate vs apron parking population is solely depending on the real traffic in the airport file? There is no priority given to gate positions? Is that correct?

But it does not apply to soft-learning, which might prefer gate positions - right?

I am asking because I see a major discrepancy between real world parking in really matured airport files, just one example is EDDL. Therefore I came to my assumptions in the topic.

Many thanks for your time and input!

 

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3 hours ago, eddl said:

You mean that the ratio of gate vs apron parking population is solely depending on the real traffic in the airport file? There is no priority given to gate positions? Is that correct?

Yes, there is no ratio if you have enough real positions to fill the wanted percentage, PSXT will only record real live aircraft movements.

 

3 hours ago, eddl said:

But it does not apply to soft-learning, which might prefer gate positions - right?

Indeed, although PSXT does not prefer gate positions, but chooses gates that fit (wingspan and cargo) randomly, whether they are ramp or not.

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Still having questions related to this topic.

I now have airport files with a lot of data from 24/7 learning.

I go through them one by one to check the parking parameters fits the real world parking.

Some issues I have seen:

EGLL: BA's T5 is mostly empty , while all other terminals are completely packed. The airport file has a lot of BAW flights though. What could be the reason? What could I do to archive a more balanced parking?

EDDK/EDDP: large cargo hubs for UPS/DHL with a lot of flights learned at night. When setting sim time to night, there is still the same aircraft distribution as during the day, mostly passenger aircraft at the terminal, but not much cargo aircraft to be seen. Also tried restarting PSXT, but no help. What can this be? While writing this I just thought about the snapshot data, maybe still all aircraft from daytime in there, ignoring my switch to night time. Will have to re-check.

EIDW: very few EIN at the airport, but the northerly parking is completely packed with RYR. Airport file does contain EINs, where does the preference of RYR come from and what could I do about it?

EDDM/EFHK: airports with a lot of based A350, but in the quite large airport files there is just a single A350 each in there. Also not a single A346 at EDDM. They seem to correctly appear in RT. Maybe gate matching for larger aircraft is more "strict", so harder to match a true parking position? Same with CLX in ELLX, totally underrepresented in the airport file. Strangely UAE A380/B77W appear at any major European airport without a problem. A bit puzzled here. 🙂 For ELLX is manually added CLX flights, but this is hard for larger airports.

Would be great to share near-optimum airport files and get more understanding of how they are read.

Many thanks for your help.

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22 minutes ago, eddl said:

Maybe gate matching for larger aircraft is more "strict", so harder to match a true parking position?

Did you not tick Auto adjust in Learner?  Then it will stretch the (wrong) gate radius to the wingspan of the aircraft.

Edited by kiek

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1 hour ago, eddl said:

EDDK/EDDP: large cargo hubs for UPS/DHL with a lot of flights learned at night. When setting sim time to night, there is still the same aircraft distribution as during the day, 

That depends on your parking percentage, and whether you  have got enough real= true entries for that day and time, otherwise PSXT will automatically broaden the day and time. You can see what it has done in the Log file. It details what type of entries it has found for parking., 

Edited by kiek

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14 minutes ago, eddl said:

EGLL: BA's T5 is mostly empty , while all other terminals are completely packed. What could be the reason? What could I do to archive a more balanced parking?

Don't know, but you cannot do much about it. We are dependent on the RT data. Maybe that part of the airport has poor ADSB coverage?  Buildings could be blocking signals you know.

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1 hour ago, eddl said:

EIDW: very few EIN at the airport, but the northerly parking is completely packed with RYR. Airport file does contain EINs, where does the preference of RYR come from and what could I do about it?

Again, you cannot do anything about the Learning process (other then  setting Auto adjust).

In this case it looks like a difference in airline policies. Ryan air pilots keep the transponder on till the gate, while EIN pilots don't do that... ? Although one may think it is airport dependent and not airline dependent. Also here one may have less ADS-B coverage at a part of the airport.

Edited by kiek

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1 hour ago, eddl said:

EGLL: BA's T5 is mostly empty , while all other terminals are completely packed.

My EGLL file has about 1300 lines for the gates at T5 ???


Cheers, Søren Dissing

CPU: Intel i9-13900K @5.6-5.8 Ghz | Cooler: ASUS ROG RYUJIN III | GPU: ASUS Strix RTX4090 OC | MoBo: ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Hero | RAM: 64Gb DDR5 @5600 | SSDs: 1Tb Samsung M.2 980 PRO (Win11), 1Tb Samsung M.2 980 PRO (MSFS), | Case: ASUS ROG Helios 601 | Monitors: HP Reverb G2, 28" ASUS PB287Q 4K | Additional Hardware: TM TCA Captain's Edition, Tobii 5 | OS: Win 11 Pro 64 | Sim: MSFS | BA Virtual | PSXT, RealTraffic w/ AIG models

 

 

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4 minutes ago, SierraDelta said:

My EGLL file has about 1300 lines for the gates at T5 ???

Are you guys talking about the same publisher, there is INIBUILD and another third party, there is Asobo and you have the default EGLL...?

And maybe T5 has lots of heavies, and the gates radiusses were too small inthe .BGL. Then you definitely have to check Auto adjust.

Just my thoughts... 

 

Edited by kiek

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Thanks a lot for.your feedback! 🙂

I have not ticked the auto-adjust, all running with default settings in the Learner.

I will check the XML files based on your comments and might get back to you with some findings.

An idea regarding empty apron areas, which usually have aircraft in real world: is there a possibility to define an optional parameter "priority" for parking positions in the XML file? If set as true, then this position gets filled first by whatever flights are listed for that position. There must be flights listed though for this to work.

This will allow to place hand-picked aircraft across the airport to bring more life to some areas. It would also allow me in the EGLL file to give priority to every forth or so position at Terminal 5, to manually balance this otherwise empty terminal a bit - having less parked aircraft elsewhere.

This would be great and solve many issues listed above. 🙂

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57 minutes ago, kiek said:
1 hour ago, SierraDelta said:

My EGLL file has about 1300 lines for the gates at T5 ???

Are you guys talking about the same publisher, there is INIBUILD and another third party, there is Asobo and you have the default EGLL...?

I have the iniBuilds one, but checking auto adjust first.

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7 minutes ago, eddl said:

I have the iniBuilds one, but checking auto adjust first.

Inibuilds here too. 


Cheers, Søren Dissing

CPU: Intel i9-13900K @5.6-5.8 Ghz | Cooler: ASUS ROG RYUJIN III | GPU: ASUS Strix RTX4090 OC | MoBo: ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Hero | RAM: 64Gb DDR5 @5600 | SSDs: 1Tb Samsung M.2 980 PRO (Win11), 1Tb Samsung M.2 980 PRO (MSFS), | Case: ASUS ROG Helios 601 | Monitors: HP Reverb G2, 28" ASUS PB287Q 4K | Additional Hardware: TM TCA Captain's Edition, Tobii 5 | OS: Win 11 Pro 64 | Sim: MSFS | BA Virtual | PSXT, RealTraffic w/ AIG models

 

 

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