Chunli Zhu, Jianping Wu, Mingyu Liu, Linyang Wang, Duowei Li, Anastasios Kouvelas
2021
This work studies the disruption that COVID-19 has caused to the global air transport industry and provides some probabilistic approaches to estimate the time of recovery.
Some policy interventions are outlined that could ease the economic crisis of the sector. Causal Bayesian Network (CBN) is the methodological framework for our analysis. Note that this study has been performed before the vaccines rollout.
Abstract
The outbreak of COVID-19 constitutes an unprecedented disruption globally, in which risk management framework is on top priority in many countries. Travel restriction and home/office quarantine are some frequently utilized non-pharmaceutical interventions, which bring the worst crisis of airline industry compared with other transport modes. Therefore, the post-recovery of global air transport is extremely important, which is full of uncertainty but rare to be studied. The explicit/implicit interacted factors generate difficulties in drawing insights into the complicated relationship and policy intervention assessment. In this paper, a Causal Bayesian Network (CBN) is utilized for the modelling of the post-recovery behaviour, in which parameters are synthesized from expert knowledge, open-source information and interviews from travellers. The tendency of public policy in reaction to COVID-19 is analyzed, whilst sensitivity analysis and forward/backward belief propagation analysis are conducted. Results show the feasibility and scalability of this model. On condition that no effective health intervention method (vaccine, medicine) will be available soon, it is predicted that nearly 120 days from May 22, 2020, would be spent for the number of commercial flights to recover back to 58.52%–60.39% on different interventions. This intervention analysis framework is of high potential in the decision making of recovery preparedness and risk management for building the new normal of global air transport.