An Approach to Forecast Air Traffic Movements at Capacity-Constrained Airports

Abstract

Due to steadily growing air traffic, airports need a means to evaluate the capability of their infrastructure to handle future air traffic movements. Sound forecasts are needed for fundraising, within lawsuits, and in order to avoid misplanning. The quality of current forecasts is often queried. Hence, this work introduces parts of a tool chain that derives future air traffic movements out of transport scenarios and compares them to the capacity of an airport. Five consecutive models within the chain yield future air traffic movements for one airport considering passenger demand, a forecast of aircraft movements, airline preferences and airport capacity.

From passenger growth to aircraft movements

“…The presented model does consecutively forecast a number of flights for these routes. The studies of Wenzel et al (2014Wenzel et al ( , 2015 show the integration of this frequency-capacity model in a more detailed approach. Here, the frequency for one airport is generated and put into the global context of forecasting the traffic at one specific airport.…”

“…This frequency forecast is also applicable to a certain single airport in order to identify capacity shortages. An analysis of Wenzel et al (2014Wenzel et al ( , 2015 uses this approach evaluating future flight schedules on capacity constraint airports. The two main varying parameters of this forecast are the passenger growth and the assumed seat load factor per year.…”

An Optimization Approach towards Air Traffic Forecasting: A Case Study of Air Traffic in Changi Airport

“…Some researchers used a neural network approach as in [21], and some researchers used support vector machines [25] to determine air traffic. Wenzel, S. et al [23] proposed a model which forecasts air traffic movements taking into account airport capacity. The model consists of 5 steps.…”

Future Passenger Air Traffic Modelling: Trend Analysis of the Passenger Air Travel Demand Network

“…Furthermore, this approach allows ignoring airport choice models at the first step and attaching these models later to AIRCAST. A sample demonstration of the routes to aircraft movements algorithm was published in [6] with a potential use case to forecast aircraft movements at capacity-constrained airports described in [7]. The trajectories network comprises additional information about the amount and location of aircraft emissions as well as time information.…”