Think Airports Are Chaotic? You Are Right.

jonfromspace writes "Nature is running a brief, but interesting article on Chaos Theory, (as opposed to KAOS) and how it relates to that damn airport shutle service. I knew there was no way to predict arrival times with any degree of certainty. >Also worth a read is this paper on applying Chaos Theory to fisheries management."

Comments

Not to be a pedant about it,

[The Cydonian]

but the Nature article talks about airport bus frequencies, not airports per se.

The distinction is important though; when you talk of 'chaotic airports', you're talking of the entire system as a whole:- luggage screening, plane scheduling, passenger movements etc. Dr Nagatani's paper talks about none of these; it merely suggests that the reason shuttle buses (and elevators) appear to come together, or none at all, is chaos.

I can understand where Dr Nagatani is coming from on explaining bus (and elevator) frequencies, but am intrigued by why it is a "problem" (as in user-level problem, not physics problem, if you get what I mean) in the first place. Okay, so the bus comes at 09:23 and not 09:15... big deal. It is merely a matter of managing passenger perceptions.

More to the point, can anyone explain why this would be inefficient for the system as a whole?