A New Airport Demand Management Approach Based on Targeted Scheduling Interventions

This paper proposes a Targeted Scheduling Interventions (TSI) approach to airport demand management, which quantifies and optimises the trade-off between air traffic delays and interference with airline scheduling. TSI provides flight schedules that meet level-of-service targets while minimising displacement from airline preferences, subject to scheduling, network connectivity, and operating capacity constraints. It results in better on-time performance than the unrestricted approach applied at almost all US airports, and better matching of airline preferences than schedule coordination applied outside the United States. TSI can be extended to capture additional policy objectives or practical requirements, and is well suited to collaborative decision-making.