Accommodating new flights into an existing airline flight schedule

Özge Şafak, Alper Atamtürk, M. Selim Aktürk

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

11 Citations (SciVal)

Abstract

We present two novel approaches to alter a flight network for introducing new flights while maximizing airline's profit. A key feature of the first approach is to adjust the aircraft cruise speed to compensate for the block times of the new flights, trading off flying time and fuel burn. In the second approach, we introduce aircraft swapping as an additional mechanism to provide a greater flexibility in reducing the incremental fuel cost and adjusting the capacity. The nonlinear fuel burn function and the binary aircraft swap and assignment decisions complicate the optimization problem significantly. We propose strong mixed-integer conic quadratic formulations to overcome the computational difficulties. The reformulations enable solving instances with 300 flights from a major U.S. airline optimally within reasonable compute times.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)265-286
Number of pages22
JournalTransportation Research Part C : Emerging Technologies
Volume104
Early online date22 May 2019
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 31 Jul 2019

Keywords

  • Aircraft swapping
  • Airline rescheduling
  • CO emissions
  • Cruise speed control
  • McCormick inequalities
  • Mixed-integer conic quadratic optimization
  • Passenger spill

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Civil and Structural Engineering
  • Automotive Engineering
  • Transportation
  • Computer Science Applications

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