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Accurately identifying and mitigating the ground service processes that significantly impact flight departure delays is crucial for promoting the sustainable development of the civil aviation industry. This paper presents AGS-DelayLink, a novel method for analyzing the complex dependencies between airport ground service subprocesses and flight departure delays. Our approach addresses several key challenges: (1) The multiplicity and complexity of ground service chain subprocesses; (2) The propagation of delays through interconnected subprocesses; and (3) The fuzzy dependency between absolute subprocess completion times and relative delay times. The AGS-DelayLink method comprises two main components: (1) A fuzzy process mining technique to construct a comprehensive model of ground service operations from realworld operational data. This approach captures the complex, often parallel nature of airport ground services more accurately than traditional process modeling techniques. (2) A sophisticated random forest regression model that leverages time difference features derived from the process model to analyze subprocess-delay relationships. We employ Variable Importance (VI) and Partial Dependence Analysis (PDA) techniques to quantify both the overall importance of each subprocess and its specific impact on delay times. We applied AGS-DelayLink to a large dataset from a major international airport, analyzing 172,538 flights over a 5-month period. Our results reveal critical subprocesses with the highest impact on delays. For domestic flights, 'Application Pushback to Approve Pushback' and 'Scheduled Arrival to On-Block' showed the highest average rates of change at 0.74 and 0.71 respectively. For international flights, 'On-Bridge to Open Cabin Gate' and 'Application Pushback to Approve Pushback' were most influential, with rates of 0.77 and 0.70. This study contributes to the growing body of literature on flight delay analysis by introducing a novel method that combines fuzzy process mining with advanced machine learning techniques. The AGS-DelayLink approach offers airport managers a powerful tool for identifying critical bottlenecks in ground operations and developing targeted strategies for delay reduction. Our findings provide valuable insights for optimizing ground handling processes and improving overall airport efficiency.
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