Passenger Formula Update

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joefremont
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Passenger Formula Update

Post by joefremont » Sat Mar 05, 2016 11:58 pm

Note! This description is no longer accurate, see below!

Hi Flyers!

I just made an update to the site for how we calculate how many passengers want to fly on each flight. Before what we would do is calculate how many passengers want to fly from each airport and how many flights were booked. We subtracted from that pool without regard to where the flight was going.

In the new system I just deployed, we will calculate not just how many passengers want to fly, but also where they want to go. We will look at the recent flights from the airport to determine places they can go to, and weight each destination based on how far away it is and the population of that area. We also look at where you can go from the destination airport. We divide the passenger population into first, business and economy classes.

Once we figure out how many passengers are available to fly, we calculate the percentage of them who are willing to pay the price your airline is charging. If you charge 50% of normal all will want to fly, 250% of normal nobody will want to fly. In between depends on how many are waiting, the more people, the more desperate they are to get on a plane.

Finally, we save the number of passengers waiting for each destination for the next flight that's booked.

The goal here is that if lots of passengers are going from airport A to B, the pool of passengers going from airport A to C won't be effected too much.

This also means if you fly from a large airport with a large aircraft to some remote airport without many people living in the area, you may never fill your plane.

If anyone has any problems please post a support ticket or flag the flight for review.
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joefremont
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Re: Passenger Formula Update

Post by joefremont » Mon Apr 11, 2016 5:52 am

After an initial trial of this I turned it off. There were a few problems, some were just plain bugs but there were a few situations where the system was falling down. First is where the destination is a major tourist destination, like Princess Juliana Airport (ICAO: TNCM) Where lots of tourists fly into but you could not predict that just based on the local population. Another is where a city has replaced there major airport and closed there old one after FS2004/FSX created there airport database. Most pilots will still have the old airports but some will have updated there scenery to reflect the new situation. In that case we have two major airports competing for passengers reducing the available for each. For both of these cases I am adding a new field to the airport called 'Destination', when this is turned up from normal to minor, medium or major tourist destination, it will add a big block of population to the airport for calculating the available passengers.

There is one situation though where I have not yet come up with a solution, that is where a VA has created a major hub at an airport. Now normally you would think the solution we have would work for that. The incoming flights would bring lots of passengers to the hub on all the active routes to add to the pool of passengers going to destinations out of the airport. In the real world, most of the aircraft start there day outside the hub and there first leg brings in the passengers and those aircraft all fly multiple times a day, in our virtual world, most if the aircraft are sitting at the hub waiting for the pilots to fly them, and since there are so many active routes, the pool of passengers get divided between all those places.

I have made a couple changes, making the system look at only the last 30 days rather than 60 days and reducing the priority of the destination the longer the amount of time since the last flight. But I am still looking for ideas on how to come up with a solution that will make the system more realistic but still give pilots the passengers they need to fly.

I will probably turn it back on in a day or two, and see how it works, hopefully some ideas will surface to make it work better.
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joefremont
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Re: Passenger Formula Update

Post by joefremont » Tue Apr 12, 2016 4:44 pm

Since there is no disagreement on this, I will turn it back on.
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joefremont
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Re: Passenger Formula Update

Post by joefremont » Tue Apr 12, 2016 9:36 pm

yes thats the idea, its not implemented yet but I added it to the database for future use. There have been time where someone submitted a new location as an airport but was rejected because while it was a place aircraft landed from time to time but there are no facilities so you can't really call it an airport. But if we had the ability to say you can't get fuel there it would be easier to include them.

Hopefully when I can release new version of the client we may take that up as a feature, but I am still a long way away before I can do that.
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joefremont
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Re: Passenger Formula Update

Post by joefremont » Sun May 01, 2016 8:24 pm

Hi Flyers,

Well my ambitious formula did not work out as well as I would have like and I have scaled it back a bit. Now it does not care about other routes from that airport. This is how it works.

First it calculates the effective population of the source and target airports, for this it examines the active routes going into the source airport and out of the target airport, excluding those routes where there is a direct flight from the source airport to the other airport.

It then calculates the max daily passengers between those airports using those values, using a formula that uses the square root of the smaller and the log of the larger. Won't get into specifics but its fairly generous, but don't expect to fly a A388 into a tiny airport and expect to get full pax.

Things to note
- First, Business and Economy class passengers are each calculated separately from each other, so you can completely drain the econ pax and still have first and business class pax available.
- Before the pool of available passengers was recalculated once a day, now it's also recalculated when you book the flight, so if you book a flight an hour after the last recalculation, you get one hours worth of additional passengers.

I also fixed a bug in the signature images that was recently introduced by some other work I had done.
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Bigdog2995
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Re: Passenger Formula Update

Post by Bigdog2995 » Fri May 06, 2016 1:38 pm

I like your train of thought.
This make sense to get more airlines to use first class and buiss' class for flights.
Over the last 2 years, I've seen a LOT less competitions between airlines, (and I like it like that).
I hope that more Airlines will take part in the active discussions with the FSA team to bring new life to all airlines :) and to bring in new aircraft as they come into service ;)
PS: Great to see admin back on and tending to the website and tickets :D you guy's are doing a great job;) keep it up ;)
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