Airport capacity management: A review and bibliometric analysis

Over the past two decades, the aviation sector has seen dramatic growth in demand with limited support in terms of supply, due to under-development of the larger airport infrastructure. This has led to congestion and delays at major airports across the world. The topic of ‘airport capacity management’ (ACM) has thereby attracted considerable scholarly attention. From our review of extant literature, we find an extensive repository of research work related to ACM, vis a vis its inherent role and the expected output. Nevertheless, extant literature has failed to conduct a systematic literature review on ACM in order to understand its evolution over time. Therefore, we analyze ACM literature in detail to grasp and evaluate the work being done thus far, using bibliometric analysis. Our analysis reveals that airport capacity, congestion, competition and ground holding problems are important keywords related to ACM. Further, using co-citation analysis we identify 5 broad clusters and thought pattern of researchers. We also propose a flowchart of literature with major research area related to ACM. Finally, we note that the Journal of Air Transport Management (JATM) with 1086 citations and 109 documents tops the list of journals publishing papers on ACM.