Simulation Based Estimation Approach for Departure Passenger Flow at Airport Terminal

Estimation of departure passenger flow is one of the prerequisites to optimize the airport terminal resources so as to meet the dynamic travel demand. This paper proposes a simulation based approach to address this problem. Firstly, the number of passenger for each scheduled flight is estimated. Secondly, the behavior of each passenger of the flight is simulated by randomly generating the departure time instant at several key stages of departure process based on the probabilistic distribution. Then, the number of passengers for each time interval can be counted with the above simulated time. The efficacy of the proposed approach is validated through the real-world data collected from Beijing Capital International Airport.