Journal of Air Transport Management | 2021
Minimum delay or maximum efficiency? Rising productivity of available capacity at airports: Review of current practice and future needs
Abstract
Abstract Around the world airports are facing capacity constraints more and more everyday, generally the runway capacities are restricted by governments and airports are unable to accept additional aircrafts. Technological improvements can decrease the necessity of policy limitations in terms of noise and air pollution. Rapidly increasing numbers of traffic developed severe scarce capacity, congestion and delay problems and the capacity that is available, needs to be allocated as efficiently as possible. Airport capacity can be allocated in different ways; administrative capacity management with slot allocation and traffic distribution rules; market-based capacity management with slot auctioning, secondary trading and peak pricing; a combination of both mechanisms; and no regulation mechanism as applied in the USA with the exceptions of busiest airports. The review contains the analysis of current state of practice and the review of relevant research on capacity and slot allocation modelling with policy and demand management perspectives. It targets identification of existing problems, inefficiencies, gaps and requirements in current practice of slot allocation mechanisms, defining options for change in policies to allocate slots more efficiently, transparent and fair by investigating market-based mechanisms. The objective of this paper is to contribute to the ongoing research for improvements to the slot allocation process that can be rationally implemented in practice in order to improve efficiency, fairness and transparency. For that purpose, based on these slot allocation approaches, we provide a critical review of status-quo, literature and current research with demand and congestion management perspectives by considering overall social welfare, airline and airport surplus, passenger welfare and explore hypothetical, computational and practical challenges that have arisen from cross-disciplinary methodologies.