Effects of Higher-Fidelity Route Definition in Modeling Fleet Development Influenced by Airport Congestion

Aviation set itself high reaching goals for decarbonization in the coming decades. One of many resulting fields of research is the operational assessment of the air transport network. Ensuing network and fleet development investigations require an estimation of limitations by infrastructure constraints. Thus, this work builds upon previous research introducing airport congestion and its mitigation into an evolutionary fleet development model. We propose a more detailed modeling of the Asian air transport network region to account for the distinct air traffic and infrastructure development in various subregions. Results show significant differences in regional congestion when compared to the currently used route model depicting Asia as one broad region. Factors influencing on this difference are identified, including regional variations in air traffic development, airport capacity growth, the airport density per area, and further secondary factors as well as modeling peculiarities. These results show benefits of a higher fidelity region modeling, outweighing additional computational effort. Thus, we aim to contribute to a more accurate air transport network modeling to facilitate the operational evaluation of novel aircraft concepts in a holistic context.