Executive Summary

Airline scheduling i.e. scheduling of flights involves the combination of various factors. They include the crew, layover cost etc. This project tries to scratch the surface of how to find a solution to each of these problems independently. The combination of the different factors will increase th complexity of the problem but the solution will also be more accurate.

Introduction
An airline offers a product services for air travel and it consists of fleets, crew and other ground facilities as its resources. Airline needs to plan its resources such that its final short term and long term profits are maximized. The objective of an airline like any other organization is to earn profit and gain customer share & loyalty. Short term profits consist of getting maximum profit by maximizing the revenue and minimizing the cost, which are more of the operations problems. The long term benefit among other things consists of customer retention, competitive strategies etc. So, the main goals are to achieve the above stated objectives taking into account the constraints of resource availability, regulations and the interactions and behavior of the system.

Resources

Planning & Scheduling

Objective

The Problem
There is some demand for the product (flight services) offered by airlines. This demand constitutes passengers who want to go from a place to the other. So, passengers want a product, i.e. schedule, for which they have to pay minimum price (fare + time) and get the maximum output frequency, service, convenience etc. On the other hand, the airline tries to minimize its cost and earn the maximum profit, while using its resources efficiently. To achieve all this there are tradeoffs. For example, the minimum cost for an airline might mean higher cost for the passengers. Lowering the frequency in a market might increase passengers cost in terms of time. Also while the airline would like to keep the fare high, the customers would like it to be low. And all these factors affect the total (unconstrained) demand. Then competition aggravates the situation even more. Then the question becomes how to model all these factors. So, to provide this service what airline needs to do it to decide the network (hence markets and the corresponding frequency along with departure time from now on we will consider the network design including all these) and the fares, taking all these factors into account. These two map to the corresponding problems of network design and revenue management. But to offer the flights, solving these two problems is not just enough. Airline need to plan the crew, fleet (which type for a flight and its route) etc. So, it is a total problem to provide a schedule, which consists of flights flown, their departure time, the fleet assigned to each flight, the route taken by a fleet and the crew assigned to each flight. These problems which might seem to be independent are related and some of the interactions have been explained in the following section. For example if one combines the fleet assignment and network design, the departure time can be changed little to incorporate some extra pairings to check and include in the final schedule. Similarly the more crew pairing might have so many possible pairings, but if the routing of fleets is fixed, it gets reduced. So, as such it is one big problem, which can be defined as to prepare a schedule which provides network design and fare along with the corresponding crew, fleet and routing. But to achieve this, the support of airport operations is required. And it spans a whole class of problems, called airport planning and scheduling. So, to achieve the above said objectives, flight and airport scheduling are the major classes of the problems. These classes include various problems to solve. For example, network design and crew scheduling are the examples of the problems existing in this class. However some other problems, which are not directly related to providing service at any given point of time, also do exist in the airlines. Some of them are fleet procurement planning, airport facilities development. While flight and airport scheduling are more at the operational level, the latter problems mainly lie in the category of resource planning and are more related to long term planning. These planning

and scheduling steps while working at these different operational planning levels solve the particular problems. But they dont provide any information about the structure and behaviour of the system. Also the long term goals require the knowledge and understanding of the system. For example how the different components of cost affect the network profitability. Other such behaviours might be the robustness in different kind of networks, interaction of utility function, cost and network structure. Such knowledge of the system interactions is always useful. It helps in operational decision making, future planning and policy making.. Also some concepts of better service, shared chartered plane etc. are the new trend. So to evaluate the existing and new policies, creating a positioning in market etc. are some of the issues in which the better understanding of the system might be useful. Also at the operational level it might be useful. The reason is that many of the parameters are used as input in these models. So understanding these parameters behaviour might be useful in developing models. It might even help in formulating assumptions etc. And practically these studies might be useful in determining the kind of fleets according to network, market etc.

Planning In Airlines

Short-Term

Long-Term

Flight Scheduling

Airport Operations

Example:

Fleet-Procurement Airport Infrastructure

Flight Scheduling
Airline flight scheduling is required at two phases: initial scheduling and reactive scheduling. The first one is at the initial planning level to provide the service. Here initial scheduling means scheduling different steps and activities for the flights and crew to follow. And the reactive scheduling means the scheduling in the after-math of some disruptions. Here scheduling need to be done in such a way that it is as close to the planned one as possible and at the same time, it does affect the profitability at the minimum. At both the stage, issues might be same. But there importance might vary. For example, at the initial planning level, increase of 2-3 hours in the run time of model might not make much of a difference, if it is improving the solution quality in term of profitability or some other objective. But in case of reactive planning 3 hours might be a long time. Airline flight scheduling, as told in the introduction part it consists of providing schedule and fare to the passengers. And to accomplish this, the problem consists of providing various direct and indirect services to the customers. As explained in the introduction part, the problem of providing the service to customers is a one whole problem. But due to the scope and complexity of problem, it has been divided into the sequential stages. Planning of airline (flight) operations can be divided into four stages. The first stage, called the schedule design stage (network design stage), provides a list of flights along with origin & destination airports, arrival & departure times and the day of the week it operates. The second stage, called fleeting, decides the type of aircraft to be allocated to each flight, based on the number of aircraft available for each type and demand forecast. Once the fleeting is done, the next step is to decide which specific aircraft of a particular fleet type, out of many available for each type, to assign to each flight. This stage is called routing. Then the last stage assigns crew to each flight. The four stages can be shown as:

Flight Scheduling

Initial

Reactive

Schedule Design

Fleet Assignmen t

Routing

Crew Scheduling

Sometimes, revenue management is considered as the next stage. To solve these stages, there are two kinds of problems addressed at each stage of scheduling. The first issue is to model and formulate the problem. Then after formulation, because of the combinatorial nature of the problem, there is a need to provide a proper solution methodology for the proposed model. The two modelling approaches for the above said scheduling different stages areintegrated and sequential. The integrated approach consists of combining a few of the above stages and modelling them together. This kind of modelling provides a more realistic picture and allows the model to capture the common factors and interactions across different stages. And it also helps in exploring all the options (i.e. all the combinations for various activities). But the complexity of this approach is comparatively more. Also one needs to check the integral constraints and the ways to handle these. The reason is that if the integrality is not taken care properly and some approximations are made in the solution, then the advantage gained by the integrated approach can be offset by these. So above are the issues with respect to the integrated approach. Then the Sequential approach is supposed to be comparatively simpler. But it cant capture all the interactions across stages. So, the choice between the integrated and sequential approach is made accordingly. Whatever approach is taken for modelling, there are some issues to be considered.

Formulation Issues
There are different kinds of the formulation issues to be addressed at various stages of scheduling. Some of these are listed below: Objective It can be cost minimization, profit or revenue maximization or may be robustness maximization etc. Here all the objectives except the last one are profitability objective. The last one is the reliability objective. Reliability objective might finally help in improving the other objectives. While profitability objectives are mainly influenced by the accuracy of forecasted parameters, proper formulation of the problems and the corresponding solution methodologies, the robustness objective has some special requirements. For example, it requires the points of robustness requirement, identifying and defining the metrics of robustness and proper integration of these metrics as objectives with other objectives. Going by the above classification, if we look at the profitability figures, there are two kinds of papers broadly. One class takes cost, profit figures as parameters and use the data values for them from the historical estimates. Some other papers deal with the components of the profit, cost, the distribution or nature of these and then incorporate them. These are more related to the analysis and interaction part, discussed later. Then for the robustness objective at the planning stage, the work done is in terms of defining the metrics and designing appropriate formulation & providing the respective solution methodology. Robustness, being one of the important aspects has been discussed in detail later. Model can be single objective or the multi-objective, combining two or more of the above objectives. Here the issues might be compatibility of units of different objectives and combine these objectives properly. Scheduling unit considered can be flight leg, itinerary, string connections at the banks etc. There can be relative pros and cons of each approach. For example, string based approach might help in removing some of the infeasible pairings at string generation stage only. Time horizon considered daily, weekly, maintenance cycle etc. Modelling approach Network flow problem, Integer programming, set partitioning, multi-commodity flow problem, non-linear programming etc. Assumptions these define the scope of the formulation and the problem considered. The issues considered above can be at any stage of scheduling. If one wants to look at one stage specifically then there can be some specific issues. Some important classification criterion on the routing stage can be shown on the following basis: Routing Maintenance Scheduling unit Flight based Connection based String based

 Objective Revenue Cost Robustness Robustness measure Propagated delay Overlapping Short connection & others Then the next point might in formulation is to decide the parameters and variables in the model. Some of the aspects like demand, fare, fleet assigned etc. can be taken as both variable and parameter, based on the assumptions. Generally for the scheduling problems the demand, fare etc. are considered to be parameter. But there might be interactions like schedule offered affects the demand and which in turn affects fare and these might be taken as variables. Studies to capture this have been covered in interaction part. On the solution methodology side, usually the attempt is made to take the help of domain knowledge, various O.R. (column generation, decomposition etc) and computer techniques because of the size and complexity of the problem. All this knowledge can be used either in developing heuristics, improving the optimal methods or a combination of the both. One example of the combination of both can be developing strategies for branch and bound.

Practical Problem (1)

An airline that operates 7 days a week has the time table shown below. Crews must have a minimum layover of 5 hours between flights. Obtain the pairing of flights that minimizes layover time away from home assuming that crews flying from Delhi to Jaipur can be based either at Delhi or Jaipur for any given pairing; the crew will be based at the city that results in smaller layover. Delhi Jaipur Flight No. Depart 101 7.00 am 102 8.00 am 103 1.30 pm 104 6.30 pm Solution: In solving the problem it is assumed that aplen flying from Delhi for Jaipur must come back to Delhi at the immediate next opportunity. It is further assumed that each plane will make only one forward and one return trip and thus there must be four planes for four forward and return flights. The problem is to deteremine the optimal pairing. As the objective is to minimize the total layover time, let us at first instance determine the layover time both at Delhi and at Jaipur for all possible pairings. For instance, for flight 101 and 201 pair, the plane leaves Delhi at 7 a.m. reaching Jaipur at 8 a.m. If it has to avail of 201 return flight, it can start at 8 a.m. next day, thereby making the layover of 24 hours at Jaipur. Similarly, for the same pairing, the plane reaches Delhi at 9.15 a.m. and leaves for Jaipur at 7 a.m. next morning making the layover of 21.75 hours at Delhi. Likewise, we detremine layover time at Jaipur and Delhi for all possible pairings and they are shown in the below tables: Jaipur Delhi Flight No. Depart 201 8.00 am 202 8.30 am 203 12 noon 204 5.30 pm

Arrive 8.00 am 9.00 am 2.30 pm 7.30 pm

Arrive 9.15 am 9.45 am 1.15 pm 6.45 pm

CREW BASED IN DELHI

FLIGHTS 201 101 102 103 104 24 23 17.5 12.5 202 24.5 23.5 18 13 203 28 27 21.5 16.5 204 9.5 8.5 27 22

CREW BASED IN JAIPUR

FLIGHTS 101 102 103 104

201 21.75 22.75 28.25 9.25

202 21.25 22.25 27.25 8.75

203 17.75 18.75 24.25 5.25

204 12.25 13.25 18.75 23.75

Construct the table for minimum layover time between flights with the help of the above two tables. For this the minimum of the 2 values of Crew based in Delhi and Jaipur istaken.

MINIMUM LAYOVER TIME

FLIGHTS 201 101 102 103 104 21.75* 22.75* 17.5 9.25* 202 21.25* 22.25* 18 8.75* 203 17.75* 18.75* 21.5 5.25* 204 9.5 8.5 18.75* 22

The layover time marked * denotes that the crew is based in Jaipur.

ROW MINIMIZATION

FLIGHTS 201 101 102 103 104 12.25 14.25 0 4 202 11.75 13.75 0.5 3.5 203 8.25 10.25 4 0 204 0 0 1.25 12.5

COLUMN MINIMIZATION

FLIGHTS 201 101 102 103 104 12.25 14.25 0 4 202 11.25 13.25 0 3 203 8.25 10.25 4 0 204 0 0 1.25 12.5

HUNGARIAN METHOD

FLIGHTS 201 101 102 103 104 4 6 0 4 202 3.5 5 0 3 HUNGARIAN METHOD 203 0 2 4 0 204 0 0 9.5 20.5

FLIGHTS 101 102 103 104

201 1 3 0 1

202 0.5 2 0 0

203 0 2 7 0

204 0 0 12.5 24.5

OPTIMAL ASSIGNMENT IS

FLIGHT PAIR

CITY AT WHICH THE CREW IS BASED Delhi Jaipur Jaipur Delhi

LAYOVER (HOURS)

101 & 203 102 & 204 103 & 201 104 & 202

17.75 8.50 17.50 8.75

Practical Problem (2)

A small airline company operating seven days a week serves three cities A, B and C according to the schedule given in the below table:

FLIGHT NO. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

FROM A A A A A B B B C C

TIME 9.00 am 10.00 am 3.00 pm 8.00 pm 10.00 am 4.00 pm 11.00 am 3.00 pm 7.00 am 3.00 pm

TO B B B C C A A A A A

TIME 12 Noon 1.00 pm 6.00 pm Midnight 2.00 pm 7.00 pm 2.00 pm 6.00 pm 11.00 am 7.00 pm

The layover cost per stop is roughly proportional to the square of the layover time. How should planes be assigned to flights so as to minimize the total layover cost?

SOLUTION: The time from a halt to the next takoff is calculated as layover time TIME MATRIX

6 1 2 3 4 5 4 3 22 -

7 23 22 17 -

8 3 2 21 -

9 7 17

10 15 1

It is given that the Cost of the layover time is approximately same as the Square of the Time. Therefore squaring each time factor we get the cost matrix. COST MATRIX

6 1 2 3 4 5 16 9 484 -

7 529 484 289 -

8 9 4 441 -

9 49 289

10 225 1

ROW MINIMIZATION

6 1 2 3 4 5 7 5 195 -

7 520 480 0 -

8 0 0 152 -

9 0 288

10 176 0

COLUMN MINIMIZATION 6 1 2 3 4 5 2 0 190 7 520 480 0 8 0 0 152 9 0 288 10 176 0

The optimum assignment is 1-8,

2-6, 3-7, 4-9, 5-10.

Conclusion
This is just a simple snap-shot of the overall much complex picture. And there might be other issues also. For example when we talk about economies of scale, it is quite related to one or the other form of fixed cost. One example of these fixed costs is acquiring runways etc. on the airport. Other fixed costs are cost of acquiring a fleet, cost of operating the fleet and even the network structure affects these costs. Capturing all these in the scheduling and other problems might require understanding these relations and also the right approach to use these. The above Project can be used just as a guideline in how to solve a simple problem and then the combinations of various problems can be taken to increase the complexity and solve all the hurdles which may arise in the course of the Flight Scheduling