Modeling Passenger Travel and Delays in the National Air Transportation System

Cynthia Barnhart (), Douglas Fearing () and Vikrant Vaze ()
Additional contact information
Cynthia Barnhart: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
Douglas Fearing: Department of Information, Risk, and Operations Management, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712
Vikrant Vaze: Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755

Operations Research, 2014, vol. 62, issue 3, 580-601

Abstract: Many of the existing methods for evaluating an airline's on-time performance are based on flight-centric measures of delay. However, recent research has demonstrated that passenger delays depend on many factors in addition to flight delays. For instance, significant passenger delays result from flight cancellations and missed connections, which themselves depend on a significant number of factors. Unfortunately, lack of publicly available passenger travel data has made it difficult for researchers to explore the nature of these relationships. In this paper, we develop methodologies to model historical travel and delays for U.S. domestic passengers. We develop a multinomial logit model for estimating historical passenger travel and extend a previously developed greedy reaccommodation heuristic for estimating the resulting passenger delays. We report and analyze the estimated passenger delays for calendar year 2007, developing insights into factors that affect the performance of the National Air Transportation System in the United States.

Keywords: industries transportation/shipping; transportation costs; utility/preference estimation; simulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/opre.2014.1268 (application/pdf)

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:inm:oropre:v:62:y:2014:i:3:p:580-601

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Operations Research from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().