Sizing parking facilities at airports

Established rules-of-thumb and industry guidelines for estimating the supply of parking at airports are based on uncertain quantities such as design year enplanements and number of airport employees, and are independent of cost. In the presence of continued uncertainty and increasing competition for limited space in and around airports, it is important that facilities are sized in relation to cost of providing and using them. A probabilistic model based on the classical “newsboy” problem is proposed to determine the optimal supply of parking in relation to expected total cost while treating demand as a random quantity. Empirical data are used to demonstrate the application of the proposed model for decision making. In addition to construction and maintenance costs, and user costs, decisions are shown to be sensitive to the level of uncertainty of design year enplanements.