Flight schedule design for a charter airline
Section snippets
Problem statement
Given origin–destination (OD) markets with demand for leisure travel, we consider the problem faced by a charter airline of determining the profit maximizing flight schedule. This problem, referred to as the charter airline service network design problem, is complicated by several operating constraints and considerations, including:
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Each (OD) market has fixed demand that is different by day of week, with the demand pattern repeating weekly. We assume the specified demand on day d for OD pair
Network representation
We represent the airline service design problem with a network in which the nodes correspond to trips and certain paths correspond to aircraft routes. For each day of the week, we build a daily network and link the daily networks together to form a single, weekly network.
Problem formulation, solution approach and results
Using the weekly network, we formulate the airline service network design problem as follows.
Special case: One-fleet type
We consider the special case of the charter airline service network design problem in which there exists only one-fleet type f, each aircraft with capacity b. With only one-fleet type, certain problem characteristics can be exploited to create an equivalent, but different model with a stronger LP relaxation.
Begin by considering a direct trip l on day d with fare classes and 2 and non-negative demand . As , it follows that any optimal passenger assignment strategy must assign trip l
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