The New World Order of Airports: A Population and GDP driven model for Forecasting Aviation Demand in 2050

Abstract

Aviation activity has been shown to mirror the expansion of urban centre activity through increased airport-city linkages, infrastructure enhancements, and passenger numbers, all of which have accelerated over the last two decades and specifically within Asia. Aviation supports vital information flow through people and goods and is a key driver of countries’ economies and business productivity despite the recent impacts of COVID on commercial travel.

Our work explores how the symbiotic relationship between global aviation networks and urban centres will evolve in response to projected changes in national indices as population and gross domestic product, and thus drive new aviation demand profiles, location links, and even new airports. This was explored using of network theory derived from computational social science as indicators for the attractiveness of airports based on global 2019 flights data. PageRank was also used as a proxy to the average desire to visit an airport and its corresponding urban centre based on access to advantageous business, touristic, or social opportunities. We combined this network analysis with Central Place Theory to capture the spatial function of the airport as a nodal gateway between cities taking part in the global aviation network. Existing volumes of flights and thus, demand for airport pairs within and between community clusters were found to be related to proximity to urban areas, GDP, network access, and how these influence the likelihood of inter-cluster travel for business and tourism. Lastly, we employed gravity models to predict significant new connections between the South and Southeast Asian regions, which used information on projections of changing international demographics, forecast future demand for airports, travel destinations and urban centres.

Keywords: Airport-to-city connections, Aviation, Mobility, Networks