Market-based airport demand management : theory, model and applications

The ever-increasing demand for access to the world's major commercial airports combined with capacity constraints at many of these airports have led to increasing air traffic congestion. In particular, the scarcity of airside (take-off and landing) capacity at these airports has not been appropriately priced, leading to excessive demand as in the Tragedy of the Commons. Congestion pricing, as a classical economic approach to the efficient allocation of constrained transportation infrastructure capacity, has a long history of theoretical development. However, its application in the airport setting must deal with a set of important differences from the classical urban roadway setting. These differences have eluded the attention of researchers until very recently. They stem from the following set of complications: i) the peak and off-peak periods at congested airports are often less distinguishable than in the urban transport context; ii) airlines are a dominant intermediary between an airport's capacity and passengers as the end-users of that capacity; and iii) airlines operate groups of flights, as distinct from the atomistic behaviour of individual commuters. To address these complications, an analytical model is developed to explore the impact of congestion pricing at airports and understand potential airline responses under a range of assumptions about the market's structure. Through a set of numerical experiments, carried out with the help of a probabilistic queuing model, we compare the economic benefits resulting from adopting fine versus coarse congestion tolls for the cases of markets with symmetric and asymmetric carriers. Given sustained demand for access to an airport and reasonably elastic responses in terms of frequency adjustments,

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• Fan, Terence P

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Amedeo R. Odoni and Nancy Rose.

• Engineering Systems Division.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/44611

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/44611