David Gillingwater

Environmental capacity and airport operations: current issues and future prospects

Environmental factors and public perceptions already constrain growth at many airports—especially in Europe—and are likely to further constrain aviation in future. In this paper, the way in which these factors influence airport development is considered, together with methods of managing environmental capacity. Environmental limits are inherent to concepts of environmental capacity and sustainability. Although environmental efficiencies in aviation are the subject of considerable research effort, more attention needs to be given to defining and finding commercially viable ways of working within environmental limits.

Leadership and organizational transformation

Following a discussion of recent literature concerned with leadership, the authors note that there is a tendency for many writers to marginalize contextual issues when examining the impact of leaders on organizations. Taking a study of three community transport organizations in the UK, the authors seek to apply some of the currently popular themes in the leadership literature to the coordinators of these organizations. It is shown that one can usefully be described as a transactional leader, another as a transformational leader, while the third is characterized as a ‘frustrated transformational leader’. The application of the adjective ‘frustrated’ serves as a focus for the consideration of contextual factors that inhibited this leader, who can legitimately be described as transformational, and which thwarted his capacity to see through his vision. A number of different contextual features are noted and it is shown how these severely constrained and in the end frustrated the aspirations of this coordinato...

ORGANIZATIONAL RESPONSES TO THE DEREGULATION OF THE BUS INDUSTRY IN BRITAIN.

The British bus industry, outside London, was deregulated in October 1986. For the first time since the 1930s bus operators were able to compete within local markets and experiment with service delivery. As a consequence, it was contended that deregulation would arrest the long term decline in bus patronage. This paper begins by documenting the key trends within the industry which have emerged since 1986. It then considers the implications of deregulation and privatization from an organizational perspective, at the level of the individual bus company. Findings from a study of nine British bus companies are presented and discussed. Their three principal strategic responses to the deregulated operating environment are identified and discussed. The evidence suggests that the ability of an individual bus company to innovate in ways which will guarantee its survival is heavily circumscribed. As a consequence, the capacity of an individual bus company to achieve the requisite level of internal stability to face...

Airport noise simulation using neural networks

Aircraft noise is influenced by many complex factors and it is difficult to devise an accurate mathematical model to simulate it with respect to operations at an airport. This paper presents an investigation in simulating airport noise using artificial neural networks. The results show that it is possible to establish a simple neural network model with monitored data for a specific airport and specific aircraft under local conditions.

Industry culture and strategic response: the case of the british bus industry

This article is concerned to demonstrate the utility of the notion of culture at the industry level. A multiple-case study of nine British bus companies highlights the way in which entrenched views and practices which were common among the nine companies restricted the range of strategic thinking among them. Many of these views and practices are emblematic of traditional bus company perspectives and are common throughout the industry. The reasons for the “hold” that the industry culture has on managers are examined. These include such factors as the impact of leadership and the inheritance of pre-deregulation features.

A strategic decision support tool for indicating airport sustainability

Manchester Metropolitan and Loughborough Universities in the UK are engaged in a 3-year project to model airport sustainability, using Manchester Airport as the main source of data and knowledge of airport system dynamics, with other regional UK airports acting as validation sites. The purpose of the model is to supply strategic decision support during the process of planning airport growth and change. There is also potential for extending the model to assist in planning the regional distribution and integration of airports. The research process is described in Fig. 1. The main model entities defined are listed in Fig. 2.

A conceptual framework for society-oriented decision support

Inspired by the operation of human social organisation, this paper presents a new architecture—a pyramid-committee—for developing society-oriented intelligence, whose structure imitates the organisation of human society in its decision making. The system takes a pyramid-like hierarchical structure with links in the pyramid forming a semi-lattice, which relate not only to nodes in the same layer, but also to others in different layers. The output of the system is a result of the negotiation and balancing of different interests. For such a system to function, the main difficulties concern the complicated relationships between different factors or agents. Focussing on the airport environment audit, we discuss the development of a model framework and the role of neural networks.

A new method to evaluate a trained artificial neural network

In comparison with traditional local sample testing methods, this paper proposes a new approach to evaluate a trained neural network. A new parameter is defined to identify the different potential roles of the individual input factors based on the trained connections of the nodes in the network. Compared with field-specific knowledge, the dominance of individual input factors can be checked and then false mappings satisfying only the specific data set may be avoided.

Decision-making processes in community transport organisations: a comparative case study of service providers

Transport services provided by voluntary organisations have grown dramatically in recent years. However, little systematic research has been undertaken on the functioning of these organisations. The aim of the research on which this paper is based was to rectify the lack of information on how decisions relating to service provision are made by such organisations — often called ‘community transport’ (CT) operators. Three organisations were selected for a comparative case study approach. The results show that the leadership approach of their key staff was of particular significance. Each organisation is moving in the direction of greater professionalism and away from its community roots. This cultural change can be attributed to responses to external forces, especially those affecting resources. Evidence suggests they are being forced towards adopting practices of the private sector, but that this need not be the case. Community transport provision is in a period of transition, the outcome of which may radically alter both its structure and its survival capacities.

Improved neural network training using redundant structure

It is a common understanding in neural network research and applications that a network with fewer redundant nodes is more reliable. This paper argues that a redundant network structure approach improves the learning process of neural networks. This redundant structure is shown to be free from extra parameters and hence does not introduce additional uncertainty. Using a small partition problem, the training results of standard BP networks are compared with those networks with a redundant structure. The comparison shows that a redundant structure does not necessarily always have a negative effect, and as a result it is possible to help a neural network obtain better performance.