Multi-stage airline scheduling problem with stochastic passenger demand and non-cruise times

Özge Şafak, Özlem Çavuş and M. Selim Aktürk

Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, 2018, vol. 114, issue C, 39-67

Abstract: We propose a three-stage stochastic programming model which determines flight timing, fleeting and routing decisions while considering the randomness of demand and non-cruise times. Our model differs from the existing two-stage stochastic models by considering not only flight timing and potential passenger demand, but also expected operational expenses, such as fuel burn and carbon emission costs. We include aircraft cruise speed decisions to compensate for non-cruise time variability so as to satisfy the time requirements of the passenger connections. We handle nonlinear functions of fuel and emission costs associated with cruise speed adjustments by utilizing mixed integer second order cone programming. Because the three-stage stochastic model leads to a large decision tree and can be very time-consuming to solve optimally, we suggest a scenario group-wise decomposition algorithm to obtain lower and upper bounds for the optimal value of the proposed model. The lower and upper bounds are obtained by solving a number of group subproblems, which are similar to proposed multi-stage stochastic model defined over a reduced number of scenarios. We suggest a cutting plane algorithm, along with improvements, to efficiently solve each group subproblem. In the numerical experiments, we provide a significant cost savings over two-stage stochastic programming and deterministic approaches.

Keywords: Airline scheduling; Fleet assignment; Aircraft routing; Cruise speed control; Conic integer programming; Multi-stage stochastic programming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191261517310202
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:transb:v:114:y:2018:i:c:p:39-67

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
https://shop.elsevie ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.trb.2018.05.012

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation Research Part B: Methodological is currently edited by Fred Mannering

More articles in Transportation Research Part B: Methodological from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().