Team 10: Opti.Fly

Executive Summary

Opti.Fly is a tool intended to help transportation planners optimize utility in travel networks. Our project strives to answer the following question: how do changes in variables such as air supply, airfare, and other consumer preferences affect traveler decisions in a region? Opti.Fly provides a user-friendly and interactive web tool that allows users to manipulate inputs to understand how user preferences and changes in air supply affect the market shares of various airports.

Opti.Fly builds off research and models developed by Professor Megan Ryerson and her team. These already existing models prior to our project take in a variety of data inputs, calculate utility, and output the distribution of airport market shares. For our project, we expanded upon this model in three different dimensions: geography, network equilibrium, and accessibility. The prior model was only built out for the state of Texas, so we have expanded this model nationally through use of ArcGIS and the TIGER/Line, T-100, and DB1B databases. Expanding the model’s network equilibrium makes the model more dynamic, allowing users to select a region and airport of interest (using dropdowns), customize consumer preferences (using slider bars), and implement changes in airfare and flight frequencies to see how those changes impact traveler decisions across a region. Lastly, expanding the model in terms of accessibility refers to transforming the model from a complex R program to a simple, user-friendly Shiny app.