Towards a Prediction Engine for Flight Delays based on Weather Delay Analysis

Arrival performance for the United States shows that over 83 percent of flights are actually on time. However, 17 percent delayed flights are still an indisputable high number, having almost eight million commercial travel flights per year, only in the US. Knowledge of the conditions leading to flight delays may be used in a monitoring and prediction tool to diminish its impact on commercial flight operations. From a broader perspective, we also consider multi-modal logistics chains, which involve different modes of transportation. These modes are adopted in consecutive legs, which have to be thus synchronized. Determining whether a delay is going to be verified for the aircraft can thus be of advantage, in order to rearrange the overall transportation process involving such leg. This work reports on investigations carried out in the context of the GET (Green European Transport) Service1 project. GET Service is an ongoing European research project, whose objective is to improve the ecological impact and efficiency of logistics processes.