Aviation Global Demand Forecast Model Development: Air Transportation Demand Distribution and Aircraft Fleet Evolution

The Portfolio Analysis Management Office (PAMO) for the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD) at NASA Headquarters tasked the Systems Analysis and Concepts Directorate at NASA Langley to combine efforts with Virginia Tech to develop a global demand model with the capability to predict future demand in the air transportation field. A previous study (Alsalous, 2015) started the development of the Global Demand Mode (GDM) to predict air travel demand based on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and population trends for 3,974 airports worldwide. The study was done from year 2016 to year 2040.

This research project intends to enhance the GDM capabilities. A Fratar model is implemented for the distribution of the forecast demand during each year. The Fratar model uses a 3,974 by 3,974 origin-destination matrix to distribute the demand among 55,612 unique routes in the network. Moreover, the GDM is capable to estimate the aircraft fleet mix per route and the number of flights per aircraft that are needed to satisfy the forecast demand. The model adopts the aircraft fleet mix from the Official Airline Guide data for the year 2015. Once the aircraft types are distributed and flights are assigned, the GDM runs an aircraft retirement and replacement analysis to remove older generation aircraft from the network and replace them with existing or newer aircraft. The GDM continues to evolve worldwide aircraft fleet by introducing 14 new generation aircraft from Airbus, Boeing, Bombardier, and Embraer and 5 Advanced Technology Aircraft from NASA.