Forecasting European Air Traffic Demand - How deviations in traffic affect ANS performance

摘要

Proven by statistical dependency of the number of controlled flights to required Air Traffic Control Officers for their surveillance, traffic forecasts influence the cost- and consequently resource planning of Air Navigation Service Providers. For efficient operations, precise prediction of the traffic demand is crucial. However, it has not yet been investigated how offsets between a predicted and the actual traffic affect established performance indicators in European Air Traffic Management. We used various metrics to calculate forecast quality. Further, we deduced cost uncertainties based on EUROCONTROL (STATFOR) induced confidence intervals. To analyze the interdependency between forecast quality and ANSP performance, we ran regression models using cross-sectional and panel data. We will show that despite large STATFOR confidence intervals and subsequent resource and cost uncertainties, actual traffic counts lay outside in most cases. In consequence, most of ANSPs are confronted with unreliable forecasts. We will further show that there is a statistically significant interdependency between forecast quality and traffic punctuality as well as service provider productivity.