Multimodality in a Metroplex Environment: A case study in the San Francisco Bay Area

The present paper focuses on the crisis management following the Asiana Crash at San Francisco Internation Airport in July 2013. The crash led to a large number of domestic and international flight diversions to many airports, such as Oakland, San Jose, Los Angeles, but also Denver, Seattle, Calgary, for instance. Thousands of passengers found themselves struggling to reach their original destination. Passenger reaccommodation varied greatly from airline to airline and airport to airport. The contributions of this paper are twofold. First a passenger-centric reaccommodation scheme is developed to balance costs and delays, for each diversion airport. Second, assuming better information sharing and collaborative decision making, we show that there was enough capacity at the neighboring airports, Oakland and San Jose, to accommodate most of the diverted flights and reoptimize the allocation of flight diversions to the Bay Area airports.