| Author: | Zuo, Yufan |
| Title: | Passenger and freight flow management in multi-airport system operation |
| Advisors: | Liu, Wei (AAE) |
| Degree: | Ph.D. |
| Year: | 2026 |
| Department: | Department of Aeronautical and Aviation Engineering |
| Pages: | xv, 272 pages : color illustrations, map |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | This thesis advances passenger and freight demand management in multi-airport systems to enhance efficiency and competitiveness in the Greater Bay Area. The first study analyzes passenger choices and airline strategies in a system with two major airports and a reliever airport connected by ground transfers. It models passenger equilibrium, airline pricing, and investment under cooperative and non-cooperative games, showing that cooperative payoffs and investments align with bargaining power, that cooperation between the reliever and its connected major airport is especially profitable when ground links improve, and that greater congestion relief increases profits and incentives for major-airport investment. The second study optimizes use of passenger-flight belly capacity for air cargo under uncertain capacity and demand through a two-stage stochastic program with Sample Average Approximation, Progressive Hedging, and heuristics. Using Hong Kong and eight destinations, the approach scales well and reliably improves performance, cutting costs by roughly 7–16% typically and up to about 30%, with even larger savings when post-reservation revenues improve and residual capacity is ample, occasionally generating surpluses on some routes. The third study examines air–high-speed rail competition under heterogeneous traveler preferences using a Hotelling framework. It finds that lower fares and greater capacity attract demand from the rival mode, that optimal prices depend on preference distributions and, when HSR also values welfare, on the welfare weight and passengers' willingness to pay. Numerical results indicate that balanced preferences are key for effective price competition, modest fare increases can benefit modes with loyal users, and gradual, balanced pricing supports sustainable competition. The fourth study formulates cargo routing in a multi-airport transfer hub as an integer linear program with heterogeneous values of time across airports, solved via a linear programming relaxation combined with an assignment heuristic. In a Greater Bay Area case with multiple major and minor airports and inter-airport road links, the method finds high-quality integer solutions rapidly, achieving feasible solutions within two hours and within about two percent of the relaxation bound even for instances that commercial solvers cannot finish in a day. Sensitivity analyses show assignments adapt to differences in transfer-time valuations. Collectively, these studies deepen understanding of passenger and freight flow management in multi-airport systems and provide implementable frameworks for real-world decision-making. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | open access |
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