We explore optimization models to support the planning and operations functions at package express carriers in China. The models simultaneously consider ground and air transportation, company-owned and purchased capacity, multiple service products, and shipments becoming available throughout the day. An extensive computational study using real-life data shows the efficacy of the models, provides insights into … Read more
We study disruptions at a major airport. Disruptions could be caused by bad weather, for example. Our study is from the perspective of the airport, the air services provider (such as air traffic control) and the travelling public, rather than from the perspective of a single airline. Disruptions cause flights to be subjected to ground … Read more
We present a novel complex number formulation along with tight convex relaxations for the aircraft conflict resolution problem. Our approach combines both speed and heading control and provides global optimality guarantees despite non-convexities in the feasible region. As a side result, we present a new characterization of the conflict separation condition in the form of … Read more
The incomplete hub location problem with and without hop-constraints is modeled using a Leontief substitution system approach. The Leontief formalism provides a set of important theoretical properties and delivers formulations with tight linear bounds that can explicitly incorporate hop constraints for each origin-destination pair of demands. Furthermore, the proposed formulations are amenable to a Benders … Read more
In the past, travel routes for civil passenger and cargo air traffic were aligned to the air traffic network (ATN). To resolve the network congestion problem, the free-flight system has recently been introduced in more and more regions around the globe, allowing flight operations to make full use of the four space-and-time dimensions. For the … Read more
This paper describes a revenue management project with a major airline that operates in a fiercely competitive market involving two major hubs and having more than 30 parallel daily flights. The market has a number of unusual characteristics including (1) almost half of customers choose not to purchase the tickets after booking; (2) about half … Read more
Schedule disruptions require airlines to intervene through the process of recovery; this involves modifications to the planned schedule, aircraft routings, crew pairings and passenger itineraries. Passenger recovery is generally considered as the final stage in this process, and hence passengers experience unnecessarily large impacts resulting from flight delays and cancellations. Most recovery approaches considering passengers … Read more
For reasons of tractability, the airline scheduling problem has traditionally been sequentially decomposed into various stages (eg. schedule generation, fleet assignment, aircraft routing, and crew pairing), with the decisions from one stage imposed upon the decision making process in subsequent stages. Whilst this approach greatly simplifies the solution process, it unfortunately fails to capture the … Read more
Airline recovery presents very large and difficult problems requiring high quality solutions within very short time limits. To improve computational performance, the complete airline recovery problem is generally formulated as a series of sequential stages. While the sequential approach greatly simplifies the complete recovery problem, there is no guarantee of global optimality or solution quality. … Read more
Schedule disruptions are commonplace in the airline industry with many flight-delaying events occurring each day. Recently there has been a focus on introducing robustness into airline planning stages to reduce the effect of these disruptions. We propose a recoverable robustness technique as an alternative to robust optimisation to reduce the effect of disruptions and the … Read more