Addressing Two Issues in the Airline Origin and Destination Survey

The methods proposed are intended to estimate historical air travel demand and capacity information which could be useful in (say) calibrating demand analysis and forecasting models. More specifically, the authors addressed two issues in the airline origin and destination survey data. One is that it contains some sampling errors. The other one is that it does not provide capacity information. To address the first issue, the authors design a constrained least square model to estimate the complete historical travel demand served by the survey participating carriers. To address the second issue, they propose an adaptive adjustment capacity estimation scheme and embed it into the solution algorithm of the constrained least square model. The authors applied the methods to the 2007 survey data. They found that 1) on average, about 75% of the itineraries’ actual capacities are utilized and the variance is about 7%; 2) the survey oversampled the total demand by about 0.4% and the variance of sample rate is about 1.1%.