A method to estimate the historical US air travel demand

摘要

The complete historical US air travel demand is not available to the general public. In this paper, we propose a route-based optimization model to estimate the historical US air travel demand. We show that the distribution of estimated demand follows a logit model. An iterative solution algorithm is proposed to solve the optimization model. The route utility is designed as a function of route characteristics. A feedback-adjustment scheme is proposed to estimate the model coefficients in the route utility function. In the numerical example, we apply our method to estimate the US air travel demand in the year 1995.