Predicting flight departure delay at Porto Airport: a preliminary study

摘要

Managing an airport is very complex. Decisions are often based on common sense and influence severalvariables, such as flight delay. This paper considers the problem of predicting flight departure delay at PortoAirport. As far as we know, this the first study on the subject.The problem is treated as an ordinal classificationtask and a suitable approach, based on the so-called unimodal model, is used to predict the delay. The unimodalmodel is implemented using neural networks and, for comparison purposes, also using trees.