Airport troughput capacity limits for demand management planning

The success of demand management approaches to curbing flight delays is predicated on an accurate and reliable a-priori determination of airport arrival and departure capacity. The assignment of declared capacity, completed more than one year in advance, must consider the inherent variability in the actual throughput capacity for each 15 minute period during the day. For airports with large variations in airport capacity, the capacity limit must be set high enough to avoid long periods of under utilization of the airport resources and low enough to avoid extended periods of excessive delays. This paper examines: (i) the variability of throughput capacity at the OEP-35 airports during the convective weather season in 2008, (ii) established the average costs of delays due to reduced capacity and the average profits per flight at each airport, (iii) given the cost of delays and lost profits, an optimum capacity is determined at each airport to minimize both the under-utilization of airport capacity and flight delays due to variability in the available throughput capacity.