Validating Airline Performance in the Future: Investigation of a Novel Validation Model for Airline Businesses

Validating Airline Performance in the Future: Investigation of a Novel Validation Model for Airline Businesses

Jacobs, N.A.A.

Curran, R. (mentor)
Beelaerts van Blokland, W.W.A. (mentor)

Aerospace Engineering

Air Transport Operations

2015-03-13

Over the last decades, air traffic facilitates the movement of people and goods all over the world, enabling economic growth and development. Despite the impact air traffic has on industries and systems all over the world, the aviation industry is influenced by the same factors as well. Energy prices, the economic situation, population growth and other aspects do impact airline businesses, as the most recent economic downturn illustrates perfectly. The world we live in over a couple of decades may vary in many aspects and it is impos- sible to predict all the factors, decisions and actions that will shape it in the future. The understanding of world as one global system, its dependencies and dynamics can never be perfect, and is limited by our knowledge. Now and in the future. Despite the ability to make perfect forecasts how the world will look like in the future, scenarios can help to define how factors will act so a variety of future pathways can be explored. In order to help airline businesses and organisation, such as the IATA, formulating and validating strategies, this work focuses on the development of a framework that enables the forma- tion and validation of scenarios that are based on dynamics, dependencies and relations of the global system. Based on a system dynamics approach, a Integrated Assessment Model is developed based on proven concepts of socio-economic and climatological modelling. This model will form the basis for the other models that will be added to calculate the demand for passenger kilometers, irrespective of the transport mode. Based on pricing and time expenditures of a journey by a transport mode, a distribution of passenger kilometers per transport mode is calculated. An Air Transport Model is used to mimic airline operations based on three types of aircraft. In this model, the transport demand, expressed in RPKs, is used to drive the demand for flights. Depending on the utilisation capacity ratio, an airline is able to cope with the demand. Above capacity utilisation ratios, the airline has to delay flights or order new assets (aircraft or runways) in order to accommodate the transport demand. Under some situations, this might leed to higher airfares or higher time expenditures per flight, which affect the balance of transport kilometers in respect to the other transport mode. Based on the performed amount of flights and RPKs, the Air Transport Model calculated essential KPIs, which are used to express the performance of the airline businesses. A Value Operations Methodology is used to validate the performance for both economic and non-economic aspects of an airline. By this methodology, several aircraft options and airline strategies can be validated under different socio-economic scenarios. Eventually helping airlines to improve their short-term as well as long-term strategical decisions.

airline
performance
KPI
transport
system dynamics
validation
holistic
operations

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:d0a1bf35-60f7-4846-bf61-a00642df7ed8

2015-04-13

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2015 Jacobs, N.A.A.