Modeling the European Air Transportation Network considering inter-airport coordination

The air transportation network is essential to en­sure mobility and connectivity between important metropolises and regions in Europe. Within the overall system, full-service network carriers operate sub-systems consisting of hub and spoke airports. These airlines enable various connections from different destinations by a low number of routes via the hub. Due to increasing traffic volumes in recent years, the system has become more congested, and several hub airports operate at their capacity limits. This has downstream effects on the hub airlines’ operation performance. Capacity expansions are needed to handle the additional traffic efficiently. To assess the impact of these measures, local performance developments and propagation effects into the whole air transportation system should be considered. In this study, a simulation of relevant European airports is used to analyze network behavior under capacity enhancements for selected hub airports and airlines. Airports are rated based on flight delays and queue times at runways. The rate of reached flight connections is used to evaluate the performance of full-service network carriers. The results underline the dependency of airlines on the corresponding hub airport operations. A 10% capacity increase at London Heathrow decreases in-and outbound delay by 42% and 80% and improves the rate of successful flight connections from British Airways by approx. 10%. Significant propagation effects for carriers using London Heathrow as a spoke airport cannot be observed due to the complex large airline networks and the resulting low importance of one spoke airport for the overall network service quality.