Sustainable airport development with performance evaluation forecasts: A case study of 12 Asian airports

This study evaluates airport performance from 2014 to 2021 with actual and forecasted data to help plan airport sustainability and establish sustainable airport development strategies. Eight Chinese airports (PEK, PVG, CAN, SZX, SHA, XMN, HAK, and HKG) and four representative Asian airports (HND, ICN, SIN, and DEL) are studied. Airport performance is evaluated from the process level (i.e. operational processes providing aeronautical service and financial processes providing commercial service) to the airport level using the Network DEA with actual and forecasted data from the grey model. Results indicate that HKG has been and will be efficient for the entire study period. There is an observed trend of an overall efficiency decrease during the forecast period of 2018–2021. This study classifies operationally efficient airports (PEK, HND, and XMN) and financially efficient airports (HAK, ICN, and DEL). Mainland Chinese airports show significantly higher operational efficiency than financial efficiency, and lower rankings in overall efficiency. It is expected that mainland Chinese airports will soon develop beyond the transportation center, possibly towards the aerotropolis, balancing economic, social, and environmental aspects for sustainable development. This study helps airport management to evaluate sustainable development strategies by assessing current and near future conditions affecting sustainability.     

Network analysis of container barge transport in the port of Antwerp by means of simulation

Inland navigation plays an important role in the hinterland access of the port of Antwerp. In this paper alternative bundling strategies for container barge transport in the port of Antwerp are analyzed. Four alternative hub scenarios are simulated and compared with the current situation with respect to the operational characteristics of the network. Discrete event simulation is used to analyze the impact on waiting times and capacity utilization at potential hubs and at sea terminals. The hub scenarios under investigation are the organization of an intermodal barge hub on the right river bank, an intermodal hub on the left river bank, a first multihub scenario with a local collection/distribution network and a potentially improved multihub scenario taking into account the specific structure of the port of Antwerp. The second multihub scenario offers most opportunities for reducing the turnaround time of all inland terminals. All hub scenarios lead to important efficiency improvements in the handling of barges at sea terminals.     

基于车流接续代价最小的编组站配流计划优化研究

编组站是铁路运输系统的重要一环,其作业效率直接影响铁路运输效率和经济效益。为了高效、经济地完成列车解编,提高铁路运输的市场竞争力,需要优化编组站配流。通过引入"惩罚系数"衡量到、发列车接续的代价,将配流问题转化为运筹学的运输问题,考虑编组站实际作业的不确定性和复杂性,以车流接续总代价最小为目标函数,建立编组站配流优化模型,并设计算法进行求解,得到优化的配流计划,验证编组站配流优化模型和算法的有效性,可以提高和优化编组站作业效率。     

Transportation disruption risk management: business interruption insurance and backup transportation

Business interruption (BI) insurance and backup transportation have been widely used in distribution centers’ daily risk management. If disruption occurs, a firm (distribution center) can exert efforts to resume its transportation, although its unit transportation cost during the recovery process is uncertain. This paper studies how ex ante BI insurance can affect the ex post transportation recovery, and compares BI insurance with the ex post action—backup transportation. We investigate four strategies: basic strategy, BI insurance strategy, backup transportation strategy, and mixed strategy (integration of the last two). The distribution center that seeks the least profit loss prefers the mixed strategy to other three strategies. However, the mixed strategy might in turn require longer transportation recovery time than the BI insurance strategy. The BI insurance and transportation recovery are complementary, but the BI insurance and backup transportation are substitutable, the backup transportation and the transportation recovery are also substitutable. We also find that the choice of BI insurance strategy and the backup transportation strategy depends on transportation market, insurance market and distribution center’s operational environments.     

Reducing the effect of passengers’ non-compliance with aircraft boarding rules

The quest for efficient aircraft boarding strategies continues to generate lots of business and scientific discussions. Boarding strategies define rules and procedures aimed to reduce boarding time and operational cost. Most of the proposed strategies do not account for passengers’ non-compliance with boarding rules. Non-compliance is one of the major non-deterministic problems that can degrade any performance improvement to be expected from adopting a boarding strategy. To that, it is of paramount interest to shed light on this problem and introduce approaches for mitigating any related performance degradation in the boarding process. Although some recent research investigations considered the effect of non-compliance on the overall boarding time under different strategies, there was a lack of remedial actions. This paper dissects the operational characteristics of the non-compliance activity, proposes two different intervention approaches to deal with non-complying passengers, and analyzes the resulting impact under different categories of boarding strategies using a cellular-automaton-based simulation.     

Cost efficiency of African airports using a finite mixture model

This paper evaluates the operational activities of African airports using a finite mixture model that allows us to control for unobserved heterogeneity. In doing so, a stochastic frontier latent class model, which allows for the existence of different technologies, is adopted to estimate cost frontiers. This procedure not only enables us to identify different groups of African airports analysed from Angola and Mozambique, but also permits the analysis of their cost efficiency. The main result is that three groups are identified in the sample, each equipped with completely different “technologies”, suggesting that distinct business strategies need to be adapted to the characteristics of the airports. Some managerial implications are developed.     

The impact of environmental variables on the efficiency of Chinese and other non-Chinese airlines

This paper explores the impact of an international focus, the proportion of cargo traffic, and the level of salaries on the operational efficiency of Chinese airlines and other non-Chinese airlines. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is employed to evaluate the operational efficiency and a bootstrapped truncated regression is applied to explore the impact of environmental variables on efficiency. The results show that an international focus has a negative impact, while the level of salaries has a positive impact. Also, we demonstrate that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between efficiency and the proportion of cargo traffic.     

Evaluating the multi-period operating efficiency of international airports using data envelopment analysis and the Malmquist productivity index

For the most part, airports are publicly or semi-publicly owned and operated with fixed assets. As such, airports have been often considered little more than infrastructure providers for airlines. However, as airports have begun to offer a variety of ancillary services including passenger transfers, re-fueling, parking, and shopping, they no longer play second fiddle to airlines. To come into their own, a growing number of airports realized their need to develop competitive strategies that can attract more air traffic and generate greater revenue. Such strategies start with the assessment of their competitiveness in terms of operating efficiencies relative to others. To help airport authorities identify major drivers for enhancing the airport operational efficiency and the subsequent competitiveness, this paper evaluates the comparative efficiencies of international airports for a multi-year period (2006–2011) using data envelopment analysis intended for dynamic benchmarking and Malmquist productivity index built on time-series analysis. Our study indicates that the productivity of an airport was influenced by exogenous factors such as shifts in government policies and technological advances rather than endogenous factors driven by improvements in managerial practices.     

Operational efficiency of Asia–Pacific airports

Airports are important drivers of economic development and thus under tremendous pressure from emerging competitors. However, few studies have analysed the operational efficiency of Asia–Pacific airports. This study therefore evaluated the operational efficiency of 21 Asia–Pacific airports between 2002 and 2011. A two-stage method was used: Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to assess airport efficiency, followed by the second-stage regression analysis to identify the key determinants of airport efficiency. The first-stage DEA results indicated that Adelaide, Beijing, Brisbane, Hong Kong, Melbourne, and Shenzhen are the efficient airports. The second-stage regression analysis suggested that percentage of international passengers handled by an airport, airport hinterland population size, dominant airline(s) of an airport when entering global airline strategic alliance, and an increase in GDP per capita are significant in explaining variations in airport efficiency.     

Operational performance evaluation of international major airports: An application of data envelopment analysis

This paper uses data envelopment analysis to assess the operational performance of 20 major airports around the world. It is found that the form of ownership and the size of an airport are not apparently correlated with operational performance of airports. In contrast, the existence of a hub airport, the location of the airport, and the economic growth rate of the country in which the airport is located are all related to the operational performance of airports. The 20 airports are put into four groups according to their efficiency values.     

Time-geographic relationships between vector fields of activity patterns and transport systems

The rise of urban Big Data has made it possible to use demand data at an operational level, which is necessary to directly measure the economic welfare of operational strategies and events. GIS is the primary visualization tool in this regard, but most current methods are based on scalar objects that lack directionality and rate of change – key attributes of travel. The few studies that do consider field-based time geography have largely looked at vector fields for individuals, not populations. A population-based vector field is proposed for visualizing time-geographic demand momentum. The field is estimated using a vector kernel density generated from observed trajectories of a sample population. By representing transport systems as vector fields that share the same time–space domain, demand can be projected onto the systems to visualize relationships between them. This visualization tool offers a powerful approach to visually correlate changes in the systems with changes in demand, as demonstrated in a case study of the Greater Toronto Area using data from the 2006 and 2011 Transportation Tomorrow Surveys. As a result, it is now possible to measure in real time the effects of disasters on the economic welfare of a population, or quantify the effects of operational strategies and designs on the behavioural activity patterns of the population.     

Evaluating public transit services for operational efficiency and access equity

Assessing the performance of public transit services has long been an important yet challenging issue for transportation agencies and researchers. Transit service performance measurement reflects a very first step towards an efficient and proactive management, where public transit agencies are increasingly pressured to provide high-quality services in spite of constrained resources. However, the performance evaluation of transit services is complicated by an array of quantitative measures available to assess the goals and the diversity in the goals themselves, which usually include improving operational efficiency and providing equitable access. While much previous work has examined public transit services for achieving optimal operational efficiency and/or access equity separately, the interplay of the two has rarely been investigated to date. This article proposes a new method for evaluating the overall performance of public transit services via a combination of data envelopment analysis (DEA), Geographic Information System (GIS), and multi-objective spatial optimization techniques. The new method is applied to assessing the performance of fixed route bus services operated by the Utah Transit Authorities (UTA) in the Wasatch Front, Utah. Results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively account for operational efficiency and access equity in an integrated framework, providing a more comprehensive assessment for transit service performance.     

Comparison of royalty methods for build–operate–transfer projects from a negotiation perspective

This study constructs a royalty negotiation model for the bi-level programming (BLP) problem and develops a heuristic algorithm for solving the BLP problem. Concession rate, learning effect, and the time value discount rate are integrated into the proposed algorithm to reflect an authentic negotiation process. A case study is employed to simulate the negotiation behavior of two parties and alternative royalty strategies are discussed. Analytical results indicate that the two parties acquire the best negotiation result during the fifth negotiation. The operational revenue-based royalty model is more preferred by governments, while concessionaires favor more the operational output-based royalty model.     

A game theory approach to urban public transport integration policy

A game theoretic conceptual framework model is presented to highlight strategies undertaken by individual public transport operators, public or private, vis-à-vis operational integration strategies. The Nash equilibrium is used to identify possible outcomes in various market situations. These are compared with reported case studies. The model, as a strategy-guiding tool, may be used to assist transport policy decision-makers concerned with public transport integration in identifying the most cost-effective form of intervention and its timely implementation.     

Measuring the efficiency of Mexican airports

This paper examines, by means of data envelopment analysis, the operational performance of 37 major airports in Mexico. Three analyses are performed considering returns to scale and efficiency scores: constant return to scale composed by technical and scale efficiency, variable return to scale based on pure technical efficiency, and a ratio of these two to measure scale efficiency. Four Mexican airports achieve overall efficiency. Some hypotheses are tested to validate managerial recommendations and derive policy implications.     

Globalization and the synchronization of transport terminals

Globalization underlines higher levels of integration between different production and distribution systems. It is commonly acknowledged that this process leans on improvements of transport modes and infrastructure, resulting in a space/time collapse. However, it is argued in this paper that the synchronization of transport terminals is the main paradigm shift of the current space/time collapse. Terminals are where transport efficiency is mainly achieved. Empirical evidence is drawn from the strategies of freight and air transport companies.     

Accounting for size in efficiency comparisons of airports

This paper adopts the metafrontier model to analyze and compare the technical efficiency of small and large UK airports. The interesting feature of the model is that it takes into account the technological differences in the estimation of efficiency, and thus increases the accuracy in the efficiency comparison between heterogeneous airports. Results show that large airports are generally more technically efficient and have less operational wastage than small airports. Along with size, factors such as location, technological access, and capital investments could contribute to the efficiency difference between small and large airports.     

Characterizing the Brazilian airspace structure and air traffic performance via trajectory data analytics

This paper presents a data-driven approach for multi-scale characterization of the Brazilian airspace structure and air traffic operational performance from aircraft tracking data recorded by surveillance systems. Unsupervised learning is performed with a flight trajectory clustering analysis to automatically identify spatial traffic patterns in both the terminal and the en route airspace for major origin-destination pairs of the Brazilian air transportation system. Based on the as-flown route structure learned, quantitative metrics are developed to describe the structural efficiency of the airspace and the operational efficiency of the traffic flows. For this, actual flight trajectories are projected onto reference nominal trajectories in space and time. The results allowed for cross-route comparisons of air traffic flow efficiency across multiple flight phases as well as for the identification of causal factors for trajectory deviations from nominal routes. An interactive data analytics tool is also created to output performance statistics and air traffic visualizations. With the provision of a systematic data-driven approach for characterizing actual air traffic operations, the analytics framework is envisioned to assist airspace design and performance monitoring processes and to provide the basis for developing predictive capabilities in support of traffic flow management.     

A multi-criteria analysis framework including environmental and health impacts for evaluating traffic calming measures at the road network level

Recent interests in both vehicle emissions and public health have facilitated the development of more eco-friendly transportation systems. This study developed a multi-criteria evaluation framework to evaluate the effectiveness of traffic calming measures (TCMs) from the various perspectives at the road network level; operational efficiency, traffic safety, environmental and health impacts. The proposed methodology employs four-step sequential simulation experiments, including driving, traffic flow, emissions, and air dispersion simulations. The results obtained from these four simulations are used to evaluate the effectiveness in terms of safety and operational efficiency in addition to environmental and health impacts. A multi-criteria value function based on the weights estimated from the analysis of an analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is applied in the evaluation framework. As an application, chicanes and speed humps widely implemented in Korean school zones were evaluated at the road network level. The proposed simulation-based approach is expected to be effectively used for the decision-making process in selecting better alternatives for TCM.     

Aircraft operational costs and turnaround efficiency at airports

The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between flight schedule punctuality and aircraft turnaround efficiency at airports, in order to minimise system operational costs and meanwhile to maintain a required level of schedule punctuality. Investigations of aircraft operational costs, passenger delay costs and airline schedule time-opportunity costs are carried out in this paper. A mathematical model is applied to simulate aircraft turnaround operations by considering the stochastic effects of schedule punctuality as well as aircraft turnaround performance. Two numerical examples demonstrate the performance of the aircraft turnaround model. Results show the significance of a proper use of schedule buffer time in maintaining schedule punctuality performance.