Location-based demand

Feature Roadmap
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What?

Passenger and cargo traffic originates and ends in cities and towns rather than at airports. These locations are connected via ground connections to their closest airports. When demand is distributed, customers will consider connections from and to any airport in the origin and destination networks.

The actual demand is not based on researched traffic numbers from the real world but is generated in-game. This formula-based approach is very flexible and - for example - allows using historic data to compute varying demand in game worlds with a data time offset.

Why?

There are various advantages compared to our current airport-based approach:

  1. It provides more flexibility in simulating different scenarios, including historic ones. The formula can work with all sorts of readily available input factors. Think GDP, Gini index, population development, economic structure etc.
  2. It serves the overall design goal of supporting different business models in AirlineSim. Example: Low-cost carriers operating at cheaper remote airports can capture some of the traffic of nearby network hubs, something that current “costs legs” due to the required ground segment from one airport to another.
  3. It drastically reduces data research effort as it does not require to research point-in-time demand values for each individual airport.

When?

Work on this has started as an ad hoc project at the end of 2025 (see the respective devlog) and is “done” from a functional point of view. That said, many UI-adjustments, loads of tuning and solving some follow-up issues will still require some work.

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A first draft of this feature is available for testing in the game world Wright starting today. You can find more details and the current state of development on a dedicated post here.

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This is absolutely fantastic news! Basically a mechanism I was also thinking about and wrote about in one of the threads on the forum last year. Can’t wait for different factors like local GDP, geography, etc. to make it into the picture, that will be a game changer. Are you also planning to add seasonality factors in the calculation in the future (perhaps based on climate, seasonal leisure demand for summer sea destinations or winter skiing, etc.)? That would be a great opportunity for some players to actually run airlines that would provide also aircraft leasing rather than running flights themselves :slight_smile: Opens so many possibilities for the future, looking forward to the further development! Happy Christmas for now!

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