Reviewing the DATAS of aviation research data: Diversity, availability, tractability, applicability, and sources

Max Z. Li and Megan S. Ryerson

Journal of Air Transport Management, 2019, vol. 75, issue C, 111-130

Abstract: The field of aviation research is entering the era of big data. While data-driven advancements in aviation have clearly brought about applicable models and results with immediate implications, we argue that the influx of aviation data should be better characterized and documented to enable more efficient and standardized usage. To this end, we examine 200 well-cited research articles from sub-disciplines ranging from revenue management to air traffic control published on or after 2010 in order to analyze the diversity, availability, tractability, applicability, and sources (DATAS) of data utilized in aviation research. We find high levels of data diversity within aviation research, with 16 data categories ranging from air traffic flow management-type data to data from distributed sensors in line with the Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm. We identified a dominance of proprietary, non-public data in aviation research, with 68% of the 200 research articles utilizing solely proprietary data in deriving their results, and a further 8% utilizing a mixture of proprietary and publicly available data. The pervasiveness of proprietary data has implications on reproducibility and extending research results. We also highlight the increasing tractability of the data by surveying the computational power required to process the data sets, and present vignettes of applications and results that stem from these data-driven studies. Finally, we propose several recommendations regarding standardizing data source nomenclature as well as increasing the availability of and usage of publicly available data.

Keywords: Aviation data; Data availability; Publicly available data; Aviation data sources (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096969971830379X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jaitra:v:75:y:2019:i:c:p:111-130

DOI: 10.1016/j.jairtraman.2018.12.004

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Air Transport Management is currently edited by Anne Graham

More articles in Journal of Air Transport Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().