Modelling Environmental and Economic Impacts of Aviation: Introducing the Aviation Integrated Modelling Project

Abstract

The Aviation Integrated Modelling project is developing a policy assessment capability to enable comprehensive analyses of aviation, environment and economic interactions at local and global levels. It contains a set of inter-linked modules of the key elements relevant to this goal. These include models for aircraft/engine technologies, air transport demand, airport activity and airspace operations, all coupled to global climate, local environment and economic impact blocks. A major benefit of the integrated system architecture is the ability to model data flow and feedback between the modules. Policy assessment can be conducted by imposing policy effects on the upstream modules and following implications through the downstream modules to the output metrics, which can then be compared to a baseline case. A case study involving different evolution scenarios of the US air transportation system from 2000 to 2030 is used to show the importance of feedback and to model a sample policy scenario in order to illustrate current capabilities.