AIRLINE OPERATIONS & SCHEDULING

Air transportations offers 2 types of services

1)passenger

2)freight

essential for economic growth and development of the country .

airline companies have to control their operating costs by managing these 3 elements.

1)flights

2)aircraft

3)crews

airline schedule planning process

composed of 4 steps

that are dealt with independently and in a sequential manner

The output from each step provides the input for the next step. These four steps are not
completely independent and combining some of these steps fully or partially can produce
improved schedules.

The 4 steps are :

1) schedule design
2) fleet assignment
3) aircraft routing problem
4) crew scheduling problem

1) schedule design : a set of flights having specific origin and destination cities as well as
departure and arrival times in order to generate a schedule that offers the highest
potential revenue.
The generated schedule constitutes the basis of the airline’s operations.

2) fleet assignment : to assign aircraft types to the scheduled flights, based on equipment
capacities, capabilities, availabilities, operational costs, and potential revenues.
highly impacts its revenues
constitutes an essential component of its overall scheduling process.

3) aircraft routing problem : solved to construct a minimum cost set of crew rotations or
pairings so that every flight is assigned a qualified crew while satisfying work rules and
collective agreements.
a duty period is a single workday of a crew
a pairing refers to a sequence of duty periods with overnight rests between
consecutive periods.
A rotation process, also called rostering, assigns individual crew members to crew
pairings.

Scheduling Timeframe :

schedule design process is performed as early as one year in advance

The fleet assignment is conducted about three months in advance

The aircraft routing and crew scheduling processes that are implemented about 2-4
weeks in advance.

Schedule Design
Schedule design, also called flight scheduling, is the basis for all the other
airline planning and operations.
In the schedule design stage, a flight timetable is constructed to specify what
cities to fly to and from, and at what times.
Various factors such as market demands, available aircraft, crew resources,
regulations, airport characteristics, and schedules of other competing
airlines, affect an airline’s flight scheduling decisions.
the size of the airline network is measured by the number of airports and
flight frequencies served by the airline.

Load factor :
is the average rate of seats occupied by passengers in a flight and, along with
frequency(no.of flights in a week), is one of the measures for airlines to decide
whether the operation of a particular flight segment is marketable or not.

The parameters affecting load factors are origins and destinations, fare-
classes, flight times, and flight frequencies.
Fleet Assignment

After the airline generates its flight schedule

Need to decide what type of aircraft (fleet type) to assign to each flight leg
In this stage of the planning process, only aircraft types are considered

The cost of assigning an aircraft of type k to a flight leg i is the sum of the
operational costs of performing flight leg i with an aircraft of type k (such as
fuel cost, gate rental, landing and take off costs, etc) and the spill cost.

Spill cost
is the revenue lost due to lack of seat availability
Bigger aircraft have high operational costs and low spill costs. Smaller
aircraft have low operational costs but they can incur high spill costs