Estimation of Arrival Flight Delay and Delay Propagation in a Busy Hub-Airport

In recent years, flight delay problem blocks the development of the civil aviation industry all over the world. And delay propagation always is a main factor that impacts the flight's delay. All kinds of delays often happen in nearly-saturated or overloaded airports. This paper we take one busy hub-airport as the main research object to estimate the arrival delay in this airport, and to discuss the influence of propagation within and from this airport. First, a delay propagation model is described qualitatively in mathematics after sorting and analyzing the relationships between all flights, especially focused on the frequently type, named aircraft correlation. Second, an arrival delay model is established based on Bayesian network. By training the model, the arrival delay in this airport can be estimated. Third, after clarifying the arrival status of one airport, the impact from propagation of arrival delays within and from this busy airport is discussed, especially between the flights belonging to one same air company. All the data used in our experiments is come from real records, for the industry secret, the name of the airport and the air company is hidden.