Dynamic airline scheduling

H Jiang, C Barnhart - Transportation Science, 2009 - pubsonline.informs.org
H Jiang, C Barnhart
Transportation Science, 2009pubsonline.informs.org
Demand stochasticity is a major challenge for the airlines in their quest to produce profit
maximizing schedules. Even with an optimized schedule, many flights on departure have
empty seats while others suffer a lack of seats to accommodate passengers who desire to
travel. We approach this challenge, recognizing that demand forecast quality for a particular
departure date improves as it approaches, by developing a dynamic scheduling approach
that reoptimizes elements of the flight schedule during the passenger booking process. The …
Demand stochasticity is a major challenge for the airlines in their quest to produce profit maximizing schedules. Even with an optimized schedule, many flights on departure have empty seats while others suffer a lack of seats to accommodate passengers who desire to travel. We approach this challenge, recognizing that demand forecast quality for a particular departure date improves as it approaches, by developing a dynamic scheduling approach that reoptimizes elements of the flight schedule during the passenger booking process. The goal is to match capacity to demand given the many operational constraints that restrict possible assignments. We leverage flight retiming as a new dynamic scheduling mechanism and develop a reoptimization model that integrates both flight retiming and refleeting. Our reoptimization approach, redesigning the flight schedule at regular intervals, uses information from both revealed booking data and improved forecasts available at later reoptimizations. We conduct experiments using data from a major U.S. airline and demonstrate that significant potential profitability improvements are achieved.
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