Development of an Integrated Flight and Passenger Delay Model

While the passenger delay model developed by researchers at MIT provides a useful capability for analyzing historical passenger delays, it does not provide a “what-if” capability that would allow analysis of the impact of potential changes within the National Aviation System on flight and passenger delay. In other words, it does not simulate flight delay. However, MIT has also developed the Airport Network Delays (AND) model which is a stochastic and dynamic queuing model that computes flight delays at individual airports in a network, and captures the propagation of flight delays through this network. Integration of the AND model with the MIT passenger delay model would provide such a “what-if” capability. The next steps in this project include combining the AND model and the passenger delays model and then enhancing this combined model by integrating a model of airline recovery process into the overall simulator.