FACTOR AND CLUSTER ANALYSIS APPLIED TO FLEXIBLE AIRPORTS’PERFORMANCE DATA

摘要

Airport operators have to anticipate future possible scenarios which might occur so thattheir airport can face the changes. Unpredictable changes on the circumstances leadforecasts often to fail as the future is not foreseeable. Flexibility helps to maintain orincrease airport’s performance levels by improving the adaptability of the airport’sfunctions to external changes. The objective of this work is to understand if flexible airportsare at least able to keep their perform results towards external changes. Flexible airportswere identified based on the literature review and a survey launched to worldwide airports.To achieve this;;the ATRS Airport Benchmarking Report from 2004 until 2011 (except2010) was used as data sample;;for the following performance categories: productivity andefficiency;;costs and financial. A factorial analysis was performed to reduce the variables;;as most of them were highly correlated;;to observe how airport evolved regarding theobtained factors. Using this data;;a cluster analysis was conducted to explore whetherflexible airport are similar among them or not during that time interval. Flexible airportsperformance seems to be similar to the other airports. However;;there are some evidencessupporting the advantages of flexibility but more studies are required.