LONG TERM AIRLINE FLEET UTILIZATION AND HEAVY CHECK PLANNING PROBLEM

Date

2023-9-11

Author

BULAK BİLGEN, Feyza

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Airlines consistently struggle to make profits. The airline industry is competitive. Industry regulations are strict, and they get more challenging over time. Demand shocks are frequent. Suppliers (fuel companies, aircraft manufacturers, etc.) are powerful against airlines. Most of the time, not the airlines but customers benefit from technological advances via decreased ticket fares. To be profitable, an airline has to reduce its operating costs. Therefore, the planning process of an airline has been of particular interest to operations researchers for decades. Different lines of research focus on various optimization problems arising in the planning process. The aircraft fleet, solely generating revenue for an airline, is the most critical resource for the company. Therefore, an airline has to utilize this resource effectively. Each aircraft in a fleet has different fuel efficiency, different rental fees, and different emission performance. Utilization planning, i.e., determining the aircraft’s flight hour and cycle load, is a critical task. While the studies in the literature make aircraft utilization decisions within operational scheduling problems, we propose making long-term rough-cut utilization decisions. The aim is to develop a long-term optimal utilization strategy that minimizes cost and forms a smooth heavy check maintenance schedule for the fleet while considering utilization terms of operating lease contracts. Heavy checks are costly, time consuming (three-four weeks) shop visits which affect an airline’s operations. The rough-cut utilization plan can guide operational scheduling decisions and align short-term goals with the long-term strategy. To this end, this thesis formulates a long-term utilization planning and heavy check scheduling problem. We develop a mathematical model and a naive greedy heuristic for the problem. Finally, we present computational experiments for the proposed methods.

Subject Keywords

Airline Planning Process, Aircraft Utilization Planning, Heavy Check Scheduling, Mathematical Modelling

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/105596

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis