Airport Populations Part 2

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joefremont
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Airport Populations Part 2

Post by joefremont » Fri Oct 31, 2008 8:01 pm

We have made a revision to the airport population system. The number of passengers wanting to fly from an airport is now based the size of the local population rather than purely on the airport size. We have added to the system a database of 47000 populated cities around the world and will use it to calculate the population of people that airport serves.

Step 1 - Calculating Airport Population:

For each city we look at all airports within 120nm and calculate the portion of the population of that city that would prefer to fly from each airport. These calculations are based on:

- The size of the airport - Larger is better, each step up in size doubles demand for the airport. But airports that are not used regularly lose the benefit of there size. It does not take very many flights for an airport to maintain its status, only 7 flights a month will keep demand at Super Airport at top level, smaller airports require fewer flights.
- The distance from the airport - Closer is better. If the distance is greater than 5nm the demand goes down based on the square of the distance.

Now if a city has only one airport within 120nm then it does not matter how small or how few flights there are, the entire population of the city will use that airport. If our database does not have any cities within that distance of the airport it will use a minimum population based on the airport size.

Step 2 - Calculating Available Passengers.

Once the population is calculated we then need to figure out how many passengers want to fly each day. This is a sliding scale were the percentage of popuation that would want to be come passangers would decrease based on the city size. Some examples of how this would work are:

Population
1,000 - 50 /day
10,000 - 400 / day
100,000 - 3,000 / day
1,000,000 - 20,000 / day
10,000,000 - 100,000 / day

Each day half of the passengers waiting for flights at the airport will leave and then the calculated number of passengers will be added in to refill the pool of available passangers.
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