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OneSky Flight supports the technology needs of four established private jet brands; Flexjet, Sentient Jet, PrivateFly, and Sirio. One key function required by these businesses is trip pricing. This is the exercise of determining the appropriate price for a trip, considering many factors. Today, this process is manual. The ultimate goal of this project is to create a dynamic pricing tool that generates an appropriate price for trips in the US and EU. There is a large part of this project that needs to be addressed: Event Calendar. The Event Calendar includes a factor for each day of the year. These factors are based on the events/holidays that happen throughout the year and their impact on the demand for days on and surrounding the events/holidays.

In order to build the list of possible events that affect the intensity of flights extended data analysis was performed. Along with processing 3 years of raw flight data (~8,000,000 single flights), students did independent research on theory behind dynamic pricing. Team determined the  patterns in raw data and identify anomalies as possible event, mapping them and sorting them in holidays, sport events, extreme weather events, etc. based on open sources, also recognized the local and global patterns before identification. The corresponding quantitatively model for model of dynamic pricing algorithm was developed. It is the hierarchical model with primary and secondary factors: considering normal weekly traffic, seasonal increments, and day of the week of a selected event. With given three years of flight history, model was build using any two years and validated using third on: the prediction of demand for third year was modeled and compared with third year actual data.

Support for this project is provided by the National Research Experience for Undergraduates Program (NREUP) of the Mathematical Association of America funded by the NSF Grant #1950644.