Evaluating the operational performance of airside and landside at Chinese airports with novel inputs

ABSTRACT

This paper evaluates the operational performance of airside and landside at Chinese airports with two novel inputs. Furthermore, the airport landside operation is decomposed into passenger-terminal operations and cargo-warehouse operations. One novel input is the capability of the runway system which is introduced into airside performance evaluation. The other novel input is cargo warehousing which is introduced into landside performance evaluation. To address multiple optimal solutions when estimating Returns to Scale in Data Envelopment Analysis, we adopted the Zhu and Shen method. This empirical study shows that neither the number of runways nor total runway length is a genuine index of runway system capability in the evaluation of airside performance. Only four airports achieved full efficiency in all eight measures while eight airports did not achieve any full efficiency. In addition, one airport did not perform well in the benchmark analysis.