Developing an airport sustainability evaluation index through composite indicator approach

Abstract

This paper proposes a holistic definition of airport sustainability comprising social, economic, operational, and environmental dimensions. Methodologically, a composite indicator approach is applied to build the Airport Sustainability Evaluation Index (ASEI), which aims to benchmark airports' sustainability performance across the four dimensions. To justify the issue of subjectivity in composite indicator building, two different methods are used in each of the normalization, weighting, and aggregation processes. Consequently, this forms eight composite indicator building schemes. Then, a variance-based sensitivity analysis, average shift in ranking (ASR), and Cronbach's alpha test are performed to examine the sensitivity and reliability among the eight schemes. Schiphol airport is selected as a demonstration to validate the ASEI with its data from 2012 to 2021 as inputs. The results reveal a significant consensus among the eight schemes in identifying the outstanding and bottom performers across the analyzed period. Additionally, weighting is found to be the most influential composite indicator building process. Further, the scheme with the most significant contribution to the result reliability found in this paper is re-scaling as the normalization method, Benefit-of-the-doubt (BoD) as the weighting method, and Non-compensatory multi-criteria approach (NCMC) as the aggregation method.