Development of network restructuring models for improved air traffic forecasts

Current air traffic forecast methods employed by the United States Federal Aviation Administration function under the assumption that the structure of the network of routes operated by airlines will not change; that is, no new routes will be added nor existing ones removed. However, in reality the competitive nature of the airline industry is such that new routes are routinely added between cities possessing significant passenger demand; city-pairs are also removed. Such phenomena generates a gap between the forecasted and actual state of the US Air Transportation System in the long term, providing insufficient situational awareness to major stakeholders and decision-makers in their consideration of major policy and technology changes. To address this gap, we have developed and compared three algorithms that forecast the likelihood of un-connected city-pairs being connected by service in the future, primarily based on the nodal characteristics of airports in the US network. Validation is performed by feeding historical data to each algorithm and then comparing the accuracy and precision of new city-pairs forecasted using knowledge of actual new city-pairs that developed. While an Artificial Neural Network produces superior precision, fitness function and logistic regression algorithms provide good representation of the distribution of new route types as well as greater flexibility for modeling future scenarios. However, these latter two algorithms face difficulty in resolving differences among the large number of ‘spoke’ airports in the network – additional parameters that may be able to differentiate them are currently under review. These insights gained are valuable stepping stones for exploiting knowledge of restructuring in the service route network to improve overall forecasts that drive policy and technology decision-making.