Effect of Road Traffic Congestion on Aviation Passenger's Flight Choice

This paper investigates how passengers choose flight times in view of ground traffic congestion. The departure time choice model of aviation passengers is developed by extending Vickrey's bottleneck model. The conditions are determined for the existence of the user equilibrium in the model. Then, the range of the difference between the airfares is established while the number of aviation passengers choosing the same flight time remains unchanged at the user equilibrium. Moreover, the tendency of the total queuing time and the incremental airfare revenue is derived along with the difference between the airfares. The results show that the number of aviation passengers is jointly determined by the flight time and the bottleneck capacity for different schedules. Under the given passenger volume, the total queuing time (traffic congestion) can be reduced or the incremental airfare revenue can be increased by properly adjusting the airfares difference. Two numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the principle and its application.

摘要：研究了高峰期地面交通拥堵对民航旅客航班时刻选择行为的影响。在考虑地面交通瓶颈的基础上建立了民航旅客出发时间选择模型，给出了模型的用户均衡的性质。并进一步分析了票价差额对用户均衡的影响，得到了均衡人数不变时票价差额的取值范围，以及民航旅客的总排队时间和航空公司票价增量收益随票价差额变化的特征。研究表明：在均衡状态下，选择不同时刻航班的旅客人数由航班时刻差和瓶颈通行能力共同决定。对给定的航空出行需求，可通过调整票价差额，减少总排队时间(减缓交通拥堵)或者增大票价增量收益(增加航空公司票价收益)。最后利用数值算例对结论进行了有效验证。