A.J. Cook

THE VALUATION OF RELIABILITY FOR PERSONAL TRAVEL

The paper reviews progress made towards a general theory of the travellers valuation of travel time reliability, and give some indication of recent empirical research in this area. In the progress it brings together a large number of theoretical and empirical results, many of which are only partly in the public domain. Key theoretical results relating to the highway mode are discussed, and expanded to take in the additional complexity of scheduled public transport services. The paper also deals with the problems of collecting empirical data, and describes a recent study carried out by the authors in the context of rail travel, showing how valuations can be derived.

Towards superior air transport performance metrics – imperatives and methods

In order to improve air traffic management service delivery, we need to better characterise and measure performance, through improved metrics. The authors introduce complexity science and illustrate examples of the additional metrics it may bring to air traffic management. The authors show how exploring metric variability is preferred to focusing on central tendency. The importance of embracing passenger-centricity is demonstrated. The first results of applying complexity science techniques to the characterisation of actual European passenger trip itineraries are presented, investigating network topologies and vulnerabilities. It is anticipated that on-going work will further contribute to existing research demonstrating the differences between flight-centric and passenger-centric metrics, establishing the better alignment of the latter with key high-level policies in Europe. The specific metric contributions from complexity science remain to be fully proven – although the initial evidence is encouraging.

A Quantitative Exploration of Flight Prioritisation Principles, using New Delay Costs

New costs of delay to the airline are presented for a range of aircraft and by phase of flight. It is shown how these costs may be suitable for cost optimisations during flight prioritisation decision-making. Desirable properties of prioritisation procedures are benchmarked against taxation principles. It is shown that Maximum Take-Off Weights, historically established as a charging mechanism in air transport, could actually be used in the context of determining flight prioritisations. Using non-linear delay costs is superior to the use of delay minutes in such optimisations and often produces more equitable solutions. Issues regarding the scale of solutions sought (e.g. by several flights or a whole network), and the implementation of truly dynamic cost optimisation, both require further research.

The economic value of additional airport departure capacity

This article presents a model for the economic value of extra capacity at an airport. The model is based on a series of functional relationships linking the benefits of extra capacity and the associated costs. It takes into account the cost of delay for airlines and its indirect consequences on the airport, through the loss or gain of aeronautical and non-aeronautical revenues. The model is highly data-driven and to this end a number of data sources have been used. In particular, special care has been used to take into account the full distribution of delay at the airports rather than its average only. The results with the simple version of the model show the existence of a unique maximum for the operating profit of the airport in terms of capacity. The position of this maximum is clearly dependent on the airport and also has an interesting behaviour with the average number of passenger per aircraft at the airport and the predictability of the flight departure times. In addition, we also show that there exists an important trade-off between an increased predictability and the punctuality at the airport. Finally, it is shown that a more complex behavioural model for passengers can introduce several local maxima in the airport profit and thus drive the airport towards suboptimal decisions.