Key Theory And Methods Of Coordinated Operation And Management For Hub Based Airport Group

“National Civil Airport Layout Plan” issued by the Civil Aviation Administration of China(CAAC) in 2007 pointed out that by 2020, efforts should be taken on cultivation of international hub, regional centers and gateway airports, improvement of function of the trunk airports, a modest increase in feeder route airports distribution, and construction of 5 regional airport groups in north(North China and Northeast China), east, central south, southwest, northwest regions with proper scale, reasonable structure and full function. From the perspective of competition and coordination among airports of airport group, this paper studies how airports within airport group act and cooperate with each other, to realize diversified and multi-dimensional development, in order to achieve sustainable development of civil aviation industry through resource sharing of the whole airport group region, thus to effectively avoid the low efficient operation caused by vicious competition of the airport group.The paper mainly studies the following aspects:First is on the scope of airport hinterland. Airport hinterland generally refers to the potential market area might be realized in the process of building and strengthening the airline network structure and improving base carrier operational performance. The close distance between airports within the airport group, making the airport hinterland overlapped, intensifies the vicious competition between airports. Based on the empirical research in the hinterland of the airport, this paper determines the scope of the airport hinterland and its influence on the potential air transport market of the airport, and identifies the degree of airport competition through comparison between the potential transport market and the actual transportation volume to direct the implementation of coordination operation between airports of the airport group.Second is on coordination operation and management technology of the airport group. Because of the heavy cross of the airport hinterland, it is difficult for competed airports to achieve sustainable and healthy development in the airport group. Judging from the airport group, only diversified air routes and flight schedule could help to realize coordinated development of airports. In this paper, a multi airport route coordination model is established to collect passengers for the hub airport from the other airports of the airport group, to minimize the travel cost. It reduces not only the travel cost of passengers but also a number of routes within the airport group, to avoid the vicious competition between airports. It further establishes the coordination model of flight slots of the airport group. The model is solved by K-means clustering algorithm, aiming to minimize the total time lost of the passengers, providing that it could meet passengers’ demand of the whole airport group, and supposing the travelers are able to mobilize freely between airports. Theoretically, the two models propose a coordinated operation method for airports of airport group in the interests of the airport, the airline and the passengers.Third is on the aviation development position of airport group. At the present stage, route traffic volume revenue of the small and medium sized airports of airport group is not sufficient to support the airport operation. However, it can play a beneficially supplementary role by developing and carrying out airport related aviation business. Taking small and medium sized airports of Jiangsu Province in the Yangtze River Delta as an example, the paper firstly studies the factors to affect the development of the aviation business of those airports, such as the geographical distribution, industrial basis, economic structure, cultural atmosphere and so on, and uses the multi attribute decision method to determine the airport rank in making a differentiation strategy of aviation featured business for the development of each medium and small sized airport.Fourth is on technology to improve airport operating efficiency. When operating in coordinated way in airport group, the competition between the airports is mainly reflected in the improvement of operational efficiency. The airport operational efficiency is primarily embodied in the utility of the runway, gate and check-in counter. The paper, establishing an optimization model of gate assignment, aims to improve passenger satisfaction with consideration of the seriously increased problem of flight irregularity. Based on the Immune Evolutionary Algorithm, the model takes the minimum traveler-to-gate time as the target function and could be used to make a rapid and efficient gate assignment for flights in different slot time supposing the airport slot is known to all. The experimental results, through calculation and comparison of the actual operating data in a big domestic airport, verify the feasibility of the proposed model and algorithms.