Low-carbon airline fleet assignment: A compromise approach

Qiuzhuo Ma, Haiqing Song and Wenbin Zhu

Journal of Air Transport Management, 2018, vol. 68, issue C, 86-102

Abstract: Commercial airlines need to balance their environmental footprint with operational cost when managing the assignment of aviation fleets. These assignments are typically made under uncertainty in terms of their cost (change in labor cost, fuel prices, etc.) and impact on the environment (weather, rules and regulations, etc.). Trade-offs of this kind are complicated, and often result in sub-optimal decisions. In this paper, by considering random demand, fare price and avgas price, we propose a multi-criteria method to solve fleet assignment problems. It involves the use of an objective, such as minimizing emission cost or maximizing profit, as a target or a level of aspiration, and the construction of a solution that deviates least from the given target in the L2-norm. We discuss the theoretical advantage of this approach and assess its performance using benchmark data on two test cases--Jetstar Asia, and a major Chinese airline. The Jetstar Asia case is first used to test the effectiveness of this approach in balancing profit against emission by employing an integrated form of simulated and open-source acquisition data. For the case of the Chinese airline, we develop a simple rounding algorithm to deal with the large-scale problem. All cases exhibited the superiority of our compromise approach over the linear-weighted-sum method in terms of accessing the utopia point in discrete objective space. An out-of-sample test revealed the vicinity of the compromise solutions to the Pareto solutions. Our method also yielded better assignment than the airline's existing strategy in terms of both profit and emissions reduction.

Keywords: Low-carbon; Airline fleet assignment; Compromise model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969699716303568
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jaitra:v:68:y:2018:i:c:p:86-102

DOI: 10.1016/j.jairtraman.2017.04.005

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Air Transport Management is currently edited by Anne Graham

More articles in Journal of Air Transport Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().