Case Study: University of Nottingham achieves faster taxiway modeling and reduced airport delays with Microsoft Azure

Buckled up and ready to go? Untangling airports using open source tools on Microsoft Azure

Manchester Airport, the UK’s third-largest airport, partnered with researchers from the Universities of Stirling and Nottingham to tackle chronic delays on airport taxiways—an understudied choke point where aircraft move to and from runways that can ripple through the whole system. The challenge was to model complex, variable ground‑movement data from many airports to better predict taxi times and improve operational planning.

Using Linux virtual machines on Microsoft Azure and public data (FlightRadar24, OpenStreetMap), the team built and open‑sourced three tools—TaxiGen, SnapTracks and GM2KML—on GitHub to automate data preparation, GPS track processing and visualization. Cloud computing cut analysis time roughly tenfold, enabling faster insights that can halve bottlenecks at Manchester, reduce costs and environmental impact, and be adopted by other airports worldwide.

University of Nottingham

Tim Walmsley

Environment Manager