Research On Strategies For Airline On Emission Reduction

While the world is stepping into the era of low carbon, the impact of aviation industry on global warming has increasingly become the focus of international attention. Launched in 2005, the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) is the largest multi-national emissions trading scheme in the world. From 2012, the aviation industry will be fully included into the EU ETS, which means more than 2000 airlines arriving in and departing from the EU will be regulated and will need to pay for their CO2 emission. Carbon emission charges constitute a major challenge to the operation of airlines. Therefore, the consideration of reduce carbon emission has become a key strategic decision of airlines.As a core decision in the airline operation, the airline fleet planning specifies on profit maximization through efficient allocation of all resources that include fleet types, routes, flights etc. The marketization of carbon emission right makes the carbon credit one of the scarcest resources in airline fleet planning allocation. This paper aims at including the constraint of carbon credit into the new fleet planning model to improve the traditional ways which have less consideration of emission reduction.At first, a set of EU's policies towards carbon emission had been discussed, which included the establishment of EU ETS as well as its impact on aviation industry. Secondly, based on the method of airline fleet planning and the prediction of the route capacity, this paper introduced the dynamic programming method into fleet renewal scheme, and built a multi-period dynamic programming model. After solving an example by this method, a set of fleet renewal decisions for each year during the planning period, with the consideration of emission constraint, had been gained. By setting the minimization of fleet's carbon emission as an objective, we built a multi-objective model to deal with the fleet assignment problem. Finally, based on the usefulness of the model established in strategic decision, some developing measures aiming at reducing carbon emission for airline had been suggested from the technical and operational aspects. The fleet planning model has high reference value and practical significance for airlines'fleet planning under the constraints of carbon emission charges.