Estimating the Volatility of Flights and Risk of Saturation of Airspaces in the European Core Area: A Methodological Proposal

Estimating the Volatility of Flights and Risk of Saturation of Airspaces in the European Core Area: A Methodological Proposal

Despite having some fluctuations and the impact of the COVID-19 crisis, the demand for flights had a general growing trend for the past years. As the airspace is limited, efforts to better manage the total number of flights are noteworthy. In addition, volatility (i.e., unpredicted changes) in the n...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied sciences Vol. 13; no. 23; p. 12576
Main Authors: Galarraga, Ibon, Abadie, Luis María, Standfuss, Thomas, Ruiz de Gauna, Itziar, Goicoechea, Nestor
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Basel MDPI AG 01-11-2023
Subjects:
air traffic management
Airlines
Artificial intelligence
Aviation
Costs
COVID-19
Energy consumption
Geopolitics
negative binomial regression
number of flights
Pandemics
Planning
risk measures
risk of airspace saturation
Traffic flow
uncertainty
Belgium
Germany
Spain
Europe
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Summary:Despite having some fluctuations and the impact of the COVID-19 crisis, the demand for flights had a general growing trend for the past years. As the airspace is limited, efforts to better manage the total number of flights are noteworthy. In addition, volatility (i.e., unpredicted changes) in the number of flights has been observed to be increasing. Efforts to improve flight forecasting are thus necessary to improve air traffic efficiency and reduce costs. In this study, volatility in the number of flights is estimated based on past trends, and the outcomes are used to project future levels. This enables risk situations such as having to manage unexpectedly high numbers of flights to be predicted. The methodological approach analyses the Functional Airspace Block of Central Europe (FABEC). Based on the number of flights for 2015–2019, the following are calculated: historic mean, variance, volatility, 95th percentile, flights per hour and flights per day of the week in different time zones in six countries. Due to the nature of air traffic and the overdispersion observed, this study uses counting data models such as negative binomial regressions. This makes it possible to calculate risk measures including expected shortfall (ES) and value at risk (VaR), showing for each hour that the number of flights can exceed planned levels by a certain number. The study finds that in Germany and Belgium at 13:00 h there is a 5% worst-case possibility of having averages of 683 and 246 flights, respectively. The method proposed is useful for planning under uncertainties. It is conducive to efficient airspace management, so risk indicators help Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) to plan for low-probability situations in which there may be large numbers of flights.
ISSN:2076-3417
2076-3417
DOI:10.3390/app132312576