An overall measure of the level of service offered at airport passenger terminals

• Grant number: 06/00588-4
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: June 01, 2006
• End date: May 31, 2007
• Field of knowledge: Engineering - Transportation Engineering - Transportation Planning
• Principal Investigator: Anderson Ribeiro Correia
• Grantee: Anderson Ribeiro Correia
• Host Institution: Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (ITA). Ministério da Defesa (Brasil). São José dos Campos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The level of service (LOS) subject is a theme of special concern for airport and airline operators. One of the main issues is the lack of meaningful standards, because most recommendations utilized by airports worldwide are based on arbitrary and hidden assumptions. Many academic studies developed during the last decades have also proven to be very limited, because none of them have been able to provide an overall LOS evaluation methodology according to user perceptions. This proposal intends to provide a new methodology for the LOS evaluation at airport passenger terminals, which would be able to evaluate the global LOS of an airport as a function of the LOS of individual components. With this measure, it would be possible to identify the level of importance attributed to individual components by passengers; that could assist the airport management in order to prioritize investments. Additionally, it would be possible to compare the level of service of an individual airport to the level of service of competing ones, in order to analyze the competition between airports, or else just for benchmarking purposes. The analysis will be based on the user perceptions, obtained by observation and surveys done at the São Paulo/Guarulhos International Airport. The AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process) method will be employed to obtain the weights of criteria and LOS of components according to these criteria. The final result will be a weighted overall LOS measure... (AU)