Air Freighter Schedule Planning

Abstract

Margins for cargo airlines that were already thin have been put further under pressure, which stresses the importance of operating a profitable schedule. Research on modelling passenger operations has proven that integrating different steps in the schedule planning process can yield a significant increase in profit. For cargo operations no integrated model exists that can provide an integrated schedule planning from scratch within reasonable computation time.
The model proposed in this work aims to integrate schedule design, fleet assignment, aircraft routing and cargo routing for both express freight- and general freight airlines. A dynamic programming optimisation framework is introduced that decomposes the schedule planning problem for a week of operations into sub-problems, that each aim to optimise the rotation of an individual aircraft. The model takes important operational constraints and airline requirements into account, such as maintenance and a minimum service frequency per flight leg, while optimising for minimum cost, maximum profit, or connectivity. Tests were conducted on three real-life case studies, that reflect the applicability of the methodology developed. The results show that the generated schedules meet imposed requirements and reflect real airline operations, according to industry experts. Furthermore, the model provides results in reasonable computation time, which for a small airline is under 10 minutes.