Performance analytics for the value chain process of international airports: a dynamic network measure with the shared and unsplittable links

To strengthen the profitability of the international airline industry, we adopt the value chain theory to investigate airports’ operational performance over periods. This study defines the runway area as a shared and unsplittable link and introduces it into a dynamic network data envelopment analysis as a special carryover link. To efficiently solve the nonlinearity issue of this dynamic operational performance evaluation problem, a second order cone programming (SOCP) approach is proposed. Local optimum obtained from different branching strategies are compared to search for the global optimum in SOCP. The proposed method is applied to study a sample of hub airports across countries, and results show that the method is able to reveal the diverse performance of transportation and profitability stages for the selected airports. Impacts of location, scale, business internationalization, and non-aeronautical profitability on the airport performance are also examined. The findings of this study assist in comprehensively evaluating the performance of international airports, pinpointing the sources of operational inefficiency, and ultimately developing strategies to enhance the profitability capability of the international airline industry.