Uncertainty/sensitivity Analysis of Airport Financial Model and Software Development

Forecasting is never able to correctly predict the future. Its main purpose therefore is to gain some understanding of the future. Hardly anyone these days will make multimillion euros plans and implement them without at least trying to simulate the future and studying some possible scenarios. Decision making is the core management activity. As airport business environments become more and more complex and dynamic it is increasingly difficult to make the ”right” decisions. Especially when it comes to fundamental decisions, such as how to design the future of their business, managers face considerable problems. Although a lot of research is carried out, decisions are still often made intuitively. Development of the tools which can be used to assist decision makers’ intuition and help them solve the strategic and operational problems is a challenge. Delft University of Technology Airport Development Center (TUD-ADC) was founded to conduct and apply research to develop tools, such as the Airport Business Suite (ABS), to help airport decision makers. The ABS project engaged in developing models and software to simulate the operation of the airport from the physical capacity, environmental capacity, and the financial point view. My work was to implement and integrate the financial model(Model 4 & 5, part of ABS) which deals with the nature of the revenues, costs, and investments of the airport; and also to gain some insights of the model via theoretical analysis. Using this model the basic information of the financial situation of the airport can be estimated. It can forecast the future financial performance based on the current data, economic factors, and expansion plans, etc. I implemented the model with Visual Basic and make simulation after specification of the model. Moreover, I introduced exploratory analysis, which seeks to gain a broad understanding of a problem domain before going