Abstract With the increasing demand in operations, time is getting more important. In order to use time and energy more effectively, it is becoming more important for airline companies and airport managements to make strategic plans for the future. To make beneficial and correct strategic plans for airways, one of the factors that is needed to be considered is future passenger numbers. With more accurate passenger number forecasts, airport managements can act more efficiently and reduce time, energy consumption and hence would be able to reduce costs. In this study, airway passenger number estimation is handled. Three metropolitan cities’ airport passenger numbers are considered. Artificial neural networks and regression analysis are carried out to estimate passenger number. In addition, data are handled in two different ways. Firstly, ANN and regression analysis are applied using original data series. In the second step, seasonal decomposition is applied on the data series and both approaches are repeated for deseasonal series. In Artificial Neural Networks approach, an experimental design is developed considering training algorithms, number of input nodes and number of nodes in the hidden layer which make up 960 design points. In the results of these experiments, performance of ANN approach is tested for three input factors and high-performance design points are identified. Furthermore, for benchmarking purposes, regression analysis is carried out. Linear, logarithmic, power, exponential, and polynomial models are developed. Finally, results of ANN and regression approaches are compared in terms of mean absolute percent error, and it is found that ANN overperformed compared to regression analysis.

Highlights • For three metropolitan city airports passenger number forecasting is performed. • For each of the three cases, 960 experimental designs are carried out considering the three factors in neural network model. • Regression model is also carried out for each of the three cases. • The two models are developed both for original seasonal data and deseasonalized data, to see the effect of seasonality. • All results are compared, MAPE has shown that neural network modeling overperforms regression modeling in all three cases.