We apply our approach to the European aviation network under varying fuel price and hydrogen supply cenarios, including both heterogeneous and homogeneous cost structures. Results show that hydrogen adoption is strongly driven by fuel costs and cost heterogeneity, increasing from below 0.6% at low kerosene prices to up to 7.5% in intermediate and 21.7% in high-cost scenarios. Although hydrogen‐powered flights occur at up to 85 airports, nearly all hydrogen is procured at a handful of supply hubs, demonstrating the critical importance of multi‐leg refueling for early‐stage infrastructure rollout. Overall, hydrogen aviation emerges as a capacity-constrained network equilibrium in which system-wide feasibility is enabled through transported hydrogen, yet large-scale uptake is bottlenecked by a small set of supply nodes. These insights highlight the critical role of coordinated hub development and flexible routing incentives in accelerating the hydrogen-aviation transition.
A Dynamic-Programming Labeling Approach to Hydrogen-Powered Route Selection in Aviation Networks
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We study passenger routing in an aviation network that blends hydrogen‐ and kerosene‐powered aircraft. Under our assumptions, hydrogen enables carbon‐free short‐ and medium‐haul flights but requires capital‐intensive supply facilities, which lead to varying prices and availabilities of hydrogen at specific airports, creating strong interdependencies between routing, technology choice, and infrastructure availability. To capture these trade‐offs, we formulate a multi‐commodity network‐flow model with explicit multi‐leg refueling and hydrogen tankering, and we propose an exact dynamic‐programming labeling algorithm that exploits network structure to achieve substantial computational gains over general‐purpose solvers.