Research On Airline Schedule Design And Optimization

This paper studies the method of finding optimal solutions to the problems in the flight planning stage of a general airline company. Flight planning is composed of flight frequency decision for each airway, departure time decision and fleet assignment for each flight. Firstly, this paper proposes, based on already known average time-dependent accumulative passenger demand function of each airway in a'timetable period', a mathematical model to optimize flight frequencies and departure times in the view of'passenger delay minimization'. Then, the paper set up a time-fixed fleet assignment model in the goal of minimizing the sum of flight operational cost, passenger spilled cost and aircraft ownership cost. The above two models are called'sequential models'because they are established in sequence. After that, a time-varied fleet assignment model is created, in which'time windows'concept is used and three factors--'passenger delay', departure time and aircraft type are considered. With the combination of multiple factors, this model is named'integrated model'as a result. Finally, all of those models are programmed and realized through MATLAB, and a case study is designed for verifying them. According to the result of the case study, the solutions to the sequential models and the integrated model are both satisfactory while the result of latter is a bit better than that of former.