De Neufville, R. and Odoni, A. (2006). What is demand management? Airport systems, Chapter 12, page 461-495

Demand management (or access control) refers to any set of regulations or other measures aimed at constraining the demand for access to a busy airfield and/or at modifying the temporal characteristics of such demand. Examples are slot restrictions and airport pricing schemes aimed at discouraging the scheduling of flights during peak traffic hours and inducing airlines to shift some operations to off-peak hours. In short, demand exceeds supply and it's unlikely that the supply of airport capacity will be able to accommodate growing demand in the foreseeable future. Some form of demand management may be the only available alternative, at least for short and medium terms. The demand management approach could be divided into three categories:

• Purely administrative
• Purely economic
• Hybrid (combinations of the two above)

The main feature of the purely administrative approach is the schedule coordination. This could only effective at mildly congested airports and in regulatory environments where change is slow and gradual. In a dynamic, deregulated environment and at airports facing severe congestion, purely administrative procedures will unavoidably lead to significant market distortion in the long run and will inhibit competition. In the purely economic approach airport users should be forced to internalize the external costs imposed by their use of the facility. In this case it's possible to optimize use of a congested facility. Congestion pricing can be particularly effective at airports where traffic is nonhomogeneous and is not dominated by one or two carriers. It is difficult to apply this congestion pricing in practice, both for technical and political reasons. As a result, the congestion-related landing fee schedules that have been implemented to date impose relatively low tolls on peak-period operations and are greatly simplified in structure. Hybrid demand management systems combine elements of administrative and economic approaches. Their common characteristic is the use of administrative procedures to specify the number of slots available at an airport. Economic devices are congestion pricing, slot markets and slot auctions to arrive at the final allocation of slots. Several airports use already a combination of this. The concept of "buy-and-sell" slots is also interesting. However, it's difficult to distinguish who the original owner or "provider" of airport slots is. Auctioning of airport slots is an idea that is largely unexplored in practice and whose application entails many complications. Interest in airport demand management is growing quickly throughout the world. It will probably expand in the future, with hybrid systems likely to be widely adopted.