A PROJECT REPORT ON

_____ Airline Operations & Scheduling_____

SUBMITTED BY

Roll Nos: SL-029

THE BOMBAY FLYING CLUB’S COLLEGE OF AVIATION

SUBMITTED TO

UNIVERSITY OF MUMBAI

ACADEMIC YEAR
(2020-2021)

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 Introduction

The United States Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 paved the way for major structural

changes in the US airline industry. Airlines were allowed to select their network as well as

their fares. This prompted a rush of new start-up airlines to the market. After deregulation,

the competition was not only between the pre deregulation airlines, but also from the new

entrants. Airlines were no longer protected, and if they wanted to be profitable, they had to

manage their operations more efficiently.

Airlines use numerous resources to provide transportation services for their passengers.

It is the planning and efficient management of these resources that determines the survival

or demise of an airline. The airline industry is an excellent example of the ‘survival of the

fittest concept.’ Table 1.1 shows the number of certificated airlines from 1976–2007 in the

United States. The table also presents the number of airlines that were closed or merged

with other airlines, and the number of newly established airlines. As the table implies, the

airline industry operates in a very dynamic and uncertain environment. Furthermore, low

flexibility to respond to changes, tightly coupled resources and limiting FAA regulations

make the airline industry a complex environment (Yu 1998). To handle the complexity,

robust and efficient planning tools and techniques are required. Operations research tools

and techniques have played an important role in handling such complexities.

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 Operations Research and Airlines

Airlines have been using operations research techniques since the 1950s (Barnhart and Talluri

1997). Operations research models have had a tremendous impact on planning and managing

operations within the airlines. The advances in computer technology and optimization models have

enabled airlines to tackle more complex problems and solve them in a much shorter span of time.

The vast contribution of these models has led to the establishment of operations research

departments in many airlines, which help save millions of dollars. These departments have helped

create an important professional society within the field of operations research, the Airline Group

of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (AGIFORS). AGIFORS is a

professional society that seeks to advance, promote, and apply operations research within the

airline industry (www.agifors.org). A brief look at their website shows that Operations Research

techniques have been successfully applied to many diverse problems such as revenue management,

crew scheduling, aircraft routing, fleet planning, maintenance, and so on, within the airline

industry. Barnhart (2008) discusses the accomplishment, opportunities and challenges of

Operations Research in airline scheduling.

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 Flight Scheduling

Flight scheduling is the starting point for all other airline planning and operations (Barnhart 2008,

Yu and Thengvall 2002). The flight schedule is a timetable consisting of what cities to fly to and

at what times. An airline’s decision to offer certain flights will mainly depend on market demand

forecasts, available aircraft operating characteristics, available manpower, regulations, and the

behavior of competing airlines. The number of airports and flight frequencies served by an airline

usually expresses and measures the physical size of the airline network. For large air carriers, the

flight-scheduling group and route development may contain more than 30 employees (Kuzminski

1999).

Table 3.1 shows a small portion of the daily flight schedule for Delta Air Lines. The level of detail

in constructing the flight schedule varies among the airlines, but it will be a complete schedule for

a full cycle. A cycle is normally one day for domestic and one week for international services.

The schedule construction phase begins with the route system. The cities in the airline network

determine the route system. The economics of an air carrier are driven by its route system. All the

short- and long-term costs attributed to fleet, avionics, labor contracts, and operations are tied to

the route systems of an airline. The marketing department plays an important role in the

construction of this schedule. Before the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act, airlines had to fly routes

as assigned by the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) regardless of the demand for the service! During

this period, most airlines emphasized long point-to-point routes. Since deregulation, airlines have

gained the freedom to choose which markets to serve and how often to serve them. This change

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has led to a fundamental shift in most airlines’ routing strategies from point-to-point flights to hub-

and-spoke oriented networks.

The schedule construction phase is a rough first schedule, which requires extensive modification

to be both operationally feasible and economically viable.

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Hub-and-Spoke

Most airlines adopt some variation of a hub-and-spoke system. Major carriers operate up to five

hubs, while smaller ones typically have one hub located at the center of the region they serve. Each

hub has a set of cities that it serves, normally referred to as spokes. Figure 3.1 shows an airline

network with Chicago O’Hare and Washington Dulles as hubs.

Air carriers normally assign large capacity non-stop flights between their hubs. Smaller airplanes

are assigned to hub-and-spoke flights. Major advantages for the airlines adopting hub-and-spoke

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operations include higher revenues, higher efficiency, and lower number of aircraft needed as

compared with point-to-point operations. Disadvantages of these operations include discomfort to

the passengers, as they may require multiple connecting flights at different hubs, congestions and

delays at hub airports, and higher personnel and operational costs for the airlines.

Route Development and Flight-Scheduling Process

There are two types of route development activities: strategic and tactical. Strategic development

focuses on future schedules which may range from a few months to ten years depending on the air

carriers’ policies. Strategic developments respond to major changes in both business and

operational environments. Tactical strategies, on the other hand, focus on short-term changes to

the schedule and routes, sometimes on a daily basis. This is done by constantly monitoring markets,

competitors, and operations. The tactical strategy includes adding, dropping flights, and making

changes to city-pair markets and their frequencies.

Long-Range Schedule Planning

• Fleet diversity

• Manpower planning

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 • Protecting hubs

• Adding or changing hubs

•Adequate facilities at airports.

Market Evaluations

• Frequency and time of service to each market

•Adding new and dropping existing markets

• Pricing policies

• Predicting competitors’ behaviors

• Code-sharing agreements and alliances.

Schedule Optimization

• Developing initial schedule based on available fleet

• Assigning aircraft to flights

• Evaluating facilities and manpower capabilities.

Schedule Issues

• Crew issues

• Arrival departure times

• Maintenance issues.

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As described earlier, flight schedule construction is the basis for all other operations. It is therefore

important to include detailed airline operations in the process of flight scheduling. This, however,

creates a complex system with a large number of variables in the model. Owing to its complexity

it is almost impossible to formulate the complete scheduling construction problem as a

mathematical model. As a result, the schedule construction process is performed through a

structured planning process involving various parts of the airline. This planning process is

decomposed into sub-problems with less complexity, which are solved sequentially.

One of the major drawbacks of this approach is that an individual sub-problem’s solution might

not be good for the overall airline operations (Papadakos 2009). To overcome this difficulty, the

process of flight scheduling is performed on a feedback system. That is, if the solutions to some

sub-problems are not desirable, the flight schedules are altered to see the impact of such changes.

Figure 3.2 shows the process of flight schedule development and the hierarchy of various phases

of airline planning.

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Load Factor and Frequency

Average load-factor plays an important role in determining the frequency of flights between city

pairs. Load factor is the average percentage of aircraft seats which are filled with passengers. The

parameters affecting load factors include flight times, frequency, type of service and, of course,

fare levels. It should be noted that a higher load-factor does not necessarily translate into higher

revenues for the airlines. As an example, Table 3.2 shows the fares, expected demands and load

factors for a 150-seat Airbus A-320. According to this table, an 85% load factor generates higher

revenues of more than 100% for the airline!

The load factor is utilized to determine the frequency between city pairs. Let the forecasted daily

number of passengers between two cities be PAX and the airline’s policy on average load-factor

be LF. Further, let us assume the average aircraft capacity is CAP. Then the frequency (FREQ) of

flights between these two cities is determined by:

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FREQ = PAX
CAP x LF

As implied by the above equation, the load factor and frequency have an inverse relationship. It is

up to the marketing and scheduling departments to actually assign these frequencies between city

pairs to different times of the day/week.

Fleet Assignment

Following the construction of a flight schedule and its corresponding network, the next step is to

assign the right fleet type to each flight in the schedule. The task of fleet assignment is to match

each aircraft type in the fleet with a particular route in the schedule. It should be noted that this

phase of planning concerns only fleet type and not a particular aircraft. The goal of fleet assignment

is to assign as many flight segments as possible in a schedule to one or more fleet types, while

optimizing some objective function and meeting various operational constraints (Abara 1989).

Fleet assignment should not be confused with fleet planning (Clark 2001). Fleet planning is a

strategic decision normally undertaken when an airline is conceived, and concerns the number and

type of aircraft needed for operation. It entails the process of acquiring the appropriate aircraft-

types in order to serve the anticipated markets based on the airline’s strategic plan. Fleet planning

addresses fleet size and fleet mix. In fleet assignment, however, we assume that the airline is

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operational with the existing aircraft in its fleet, and the problem is to assign a fleet type to each

flight leg.

Airlines typically operate a number of different fleet types. Each fleet type has different

characteristics and costs, such as seating capacity, landing weights, crew, maintenance, and fuel.

Maintenance cost is a major factor that persuades airlines to be less diverse when planning for their

fleet. Fleet diversity requires the airlines to have skilled crew and personnel for each fleet type,

plan for different maintenance checks, and have less flexibility in replacing an aircraft when a

failure occurs. Sherali et al. (2006) provide an overview of fleet assignment models integrated with

maintenance planning and crew scheduling.

Terms commonly used in the airline industry explained:

ASM (ASK): Available Seat Miles (Kilometers) represents the annual airline capacity, or supply

of seats, and refers to the number of seats available for passengers during the year multiplied by

the number of miles (kilometers) that those seats are flown.

RPM (RPK): Revenue Passenger Miles (Kilometers) represents the total number of paying

passengers flown on all flight segments multiplied by the number of miles (kilometers) that those

passengers are flown. RPM (RPK) is considered to be demand. It should be noted that RPM (RPK)

is typically less than ASM (ASK). This is because airlines will not have all the seats filled on all

flight segments during the entire year.

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Yield: Yield is how much an airline makes per revenue passenger mile (kilometer). In other words,

yield is how much an airline makes per mile (kilometer) on each seat sold. Yield is obtained by

dividing total operating revenue divided by RPM (RPK).

RASM (RASK): Revenue per Available Seat Mile (Kilometer), or ‘unit revenue’ represents how

much an airline made across all the available seats that were supplied. RASM (RASK) is calculated

by dividing the total operating revenue by available seat mile (kilometer) or ASM (ASK). Since

ASM (ASK) is generally larger than RPM (RPK), yield has a higher value than RASM (RASK).

CASM (CASK): Cost per Available Seat Mile (Kilometer) or ‘unit cost’ is the average cost of

flying one seat for a mile (kilometer). CASM (CASK) is calculated by dividing the total operating

cost by ASM (ASK).

Table 4.2 presents the above measures for select US airlines differentiated by market segments.

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A major concern in formulating the fleet assignment problem is keeping track of the fleet at

different stations (airports) at any given point in time. Fortunately, researchers have developed an

ingenious method of adopting a time-space network to formulate this problem. Figure 4.1 shows

such a network for five cities.

This approach facilitates the process of modeling the fleet assignment problem. The above time-

space network presents the airports as columns, and times of the day as rows. In this network, the

arcs (arrows) are the flights, and nodes represent the arrival/departure of a flight segment at a

specific airport, at a specific time of the day. A wrap-around arc is a ground arc which connects

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the last node to the first node in a given city. These arcs normally represent the aircraft that stay

overnight in an airport, and connect the last arrival to the next day’s departure flight.

The fleet assignment problem is basically formulated as a multi-commodity network problem.

Each node represents supply/demand, which can be satisfied through a diverse fleet. The model

seeks to minimize the total cost or maximize the net profit by assigning the most appropriate fleet

type to each flight leg. The constraints ensure that each flight is assigned to a particular fleet type,

and that the number of aircraft for each fleet does not exceed the number of available aircraft.

Other side-constraints may include curfew, range, noise, forced turns, maintenance, and user-

specific restrictions.

In the mathematical model presented here, the objective function represents the total cost of the

network, which we seek to minimize. These costs include two parts: operating costs and spill costs.

Operating Costs

The operating costs for a flight mainly depend on the type of the fleet assigned to that flight and

are determined as follows:

Operating costs of a flight = CASM of the fleet distance number of seats on the aircraft

Passenger-Spill Costs

An important issue in assigning fleet types to flights is the passenger demand for each flight

segment. Assigning large capacity aircraft to flights with low demand leads to low utilization and

consequently low load-factor for the airline. On the other hand, assigning small aircraft to flight

legs with high demand leads to passenger spills. Spill is the degree of average demand, which

exceeds the capacity offered. The spill cost is therefore the revenue of lost passengers due to

insufficient aircraft capacity.

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Recapture Rate

A closely related topic to passenger spill is the recapture rate. The recapture rate represents the

percentage of passengers that were spilled, but could be accommodated or recaptured on other

flights by the same airline. That is, if a passenger cannot get a seat on a specific flight, the airline

offers earlier or later flights (in some cases with bonuses) to the passenger for consideration. If the

passenger accepts the offer for another flight, then this passenger is considered to be recaptured.

The recapture rate among the major airlines is typically very high. This is due to high flight

frequencies offered by these airlines as well as other marketing incentives such as frequent-flyer

programs.

Aircraft Routing

The fleet assignment identifies the flow of fleet through the network. However, it does not identify

which specific aircraft from that fleet is assigned to each flight leg. Aircraft routing is the process

of assigning each individual aircraft (referred to as tail number) within each fleet to flight legs.

The aircraft routing is also referred to as aircraft rotation, aircraft assignment or tail assignment.

The major goal of this assignment problem is to maximize the revenue or minimize operating cost

with the following considerations:

• Flight coverage: each flight leg must be covered by only one aircraft.

• Aircraft load balance: the aircraft must have balanced utilization loads.

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• Maintenance requirements: not all the airports that an airline flies to have the capability to

perform maintenance checks on all fleet types. The airlines normally have maintenance bases,

typically at their hubs, for different fleet types. The maintenance consideration is to ensure that the

aircraft are flown through the network in a manner that allows them to receive the required

maintenance checks at the right time and at the right base.

Aircraft Tail Number

Aircraft are normally distinguished by their tail registration numbers. A tail number is a unique

serial number assigned to each aircraft for each airline in each country. The airlines choose to

organize their tail suffix numbering system according to their convenience. In the US, aircraft tail

numbers consist of a prefix ‘N’ and five alpha/numeric characters. These characters normally

represent the fleet type, the sequence of aircraft in the fleet and the airline. As an example, in

N723TZ, N is the country code for USA, 723 is used to designate the particular aircraft, and TZ is

the airline code for ATA. For other countries, the tail number typically consists of two characters

designating the country, followed by three alpha/ numeric characters. For example, a Boeing 747–

4H6 for Malaysia Airlines may be assigned the tail number 9M-MPK, where 9M is the country

code designator for Malaysia (Airliners.Net 2009).

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 Maintenance Requirements

Maintenance activities are the backbone of a successful and profitable airline company. In the

airline industry, the role of maintenance is to provide safe, airworthy, on-time aircraft every day.

An airline generally has a diverse fleet of aircraft. Each fleet type has a predetermined maintenance

program established by the aircraft manufacturer and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Aircraft maintenance must be planned and performed according to the prescribed procedures and

standards.

The FAA mandates that the airlines perform four types of aircraft maintenance, commonly referred

to as A-, B-, C- and D-checks. These checks vary in scope, duration, and frequency. The most

common maintenance check is the A-check, which involves a visual inspection of major systems.

The FAA mandates that airlines perform the A-checks approximately every 60 flight hours. This

is equivalent to four–eight operating days depending on aircraft utilization. If an aircraft does not

receive the A-check within this period, it is grounded until such maintenance is performed. B-

checks involve a thorough visual inspection and lubricating of all moving parts. This type of

maintenance is performed every 300 to 600 hours of flight. C- and D-checks involve taking the

aircraft out of service, and are performed every one to four years.

The airline maintenance practices, however, are generally more stringent. They perform A-checks

every three to four days. The time required to perform an A- check on an aircraft is about 3 to 10

hours. The A-checks are normally performed between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. while the aircraft is on

the ground. Therefore, the aircraft-routing problem must ensure that the aircraft is at the right base

at the right time for this maintenance. Most aircraft-routing models incorporate these A- checks in

their formulations since they are routine.

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 Crew Scheduling

Crew scheduling involves the process of identifying sequences of flight legs and assigning both

the cockpit and cabin crews to these sequences. Crew scheduling, like aircraft routing, is normally

performed after the fleet-assignment process. Total crew cost, including salaries, benefits, and

expenses, is the second largest cost figure, after the cost of fuel, for airlines. Table 6.1 presents the

total number of crew, annual crew salaries and benefits, and flight-crew expenses for select US

airlines. The third column in this table represents regular flight-crew salaries and benefits. The

fourth column, flight-crew expenses, includes per diems and other expenses incurred for hotels,

parking, meals, taxi-cabs, among others, in order for an airline to maintain its crew at a city other

than their home base. Note that this cost is in addition to the salaries and benefits that the airlines

pay to their flight crew. The last column shows flight-crew expenses as a percentage of salaries

and benefits (column 4 divided by column 3).

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Unlike the fuel cost, a large portion of flight-crew expenses are controllable. As Table 6.1 suggests,

even a small percentage of savings in flight- crew expenses through better scheduling translates

into millions of dollars, which ultimately can determine the survival or demise of an airline.

Because of such large anticipated savings, the crew scheduling problem has received considerable

attention from both academia and industry.

Crew scheduling is one of the most computationally intensive combinatorial problems. The crew

scheduling problem is typically solved in two phases, crew pairing and crew rostering. This is

mainly because the two problems are too large to address simultaneously.

Crew Pairing

The first phase in the crew scheduling is to develop crew pairing. Crew pairing is a sequence of

flight legs, within the same fleet, that starts and ends at the same crew base. A crew base is the

home station or city in which the crew actually lives. Large airlines typically have several crew

bases. The sequence of crew pairing must satisfy many constraints such as union, government, and

contractual regulations. A crew pairing sequence may typically span from one to five days,

depending on the airline. The objective of crew pairing is to find a set of pairings that covers all

flights and minimizes the total crew cost. The final crew pairing includes dates and times for each

day. A typical assumption in crew pairing is that flight schedules are repeated daily. This

assumption may be true for the week-day schedules, but for the weekends, the airlines normally

have a lower frequency of flights. The adopted approach is normally to solve the crew pairing

problem for a typical weekday, and then make modifications and adjustments for the weekends.

Note that in this phase of crew pairing, we generate pairings of flight legs that are feasible and

satisfy the regulations. In this phase, we do not address individual crew members. This phase is

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also referred to as an impersonal phase. The assignment of each specific crew member to these

pairings in the second phase, that is, crew rostering. The following definitions are used in

addressing the crew-pairing problem:

 Duty: A working day of a crew may consist of several flight segments. The length of a
duty is determined by Federal Aviation Regulations (FAR) in the United States, as well as
by individual airline rules. Under the Federal law, airline pilots cannot fly more than 8
hours in a 24-hour period. They also must be able to rest for 8 hours in that same time span.
 Sit connection: A connection during duty is called a sit connection. This involves the
waiting times, on the part of the crew, for changing planes onto their next leg of duty.
Normally, airlines impose minimum and maximum sit connection times, typically between
10 minutes and 3 hours.
 Rest: A connection between two duties is referred to as rest, overnight connection or
layover.

The objective of the crew pairing problem is to minimize the total cost of assigning crews to flight

legs, such that every flight is covered, and making sure that union, government, and airline rules

are satisfied. Furthermore, the constraints should also consider the number of available crews at

each base. This problem usually seeks pairings that translate into a high utilization of crew flying

time, and minimum sit connection times. The airlines normally attempt to keep the crew with the

same aircraft (tail number) on multiple flight legs as much as possible. This way, crew-related

problems, such as delays and cancelled connecting flights, will be reduced. Delayed, cancelled

connecting flights, or other difficulties in flight pairings result in deadheading. Deadheading

happens when the crew is transported as non- revenue passengers.

It should be noted that the solutions for the aircraft routing and crew pairing cannot be the same.

First, crew members need more rest. An aircraft can be utilized for 14 hours in one day, but the

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crew can stay with the aircraft only 8 hours. Second, crew pairing identifies flight legs that start

and end at the same crew base (i.e., only JFK to JFK in our case). This is not a constraint for the

aircraft routing problem (where, for example SFO to SFO is possible) as long as it stays at a

maintenance station overnight every 3–5 days. Third, the crew pairing problem does not consider

turn-around times as they may just land with one aircraft and takeoff with another in a very short

time.

Similar to aircraft routing discussed, the crew-pairing problem is typically formulated as a set-

partitioning problem with some side constraints. In this set-partitioning problem, the rows of the

matrix represent feasible crew pairings and the columns are scheduled daily flights.

Pairings Generators
The pairings are generated based on rules and regulations. Note that at this stage, these pairings

just show the sequence of flights assigned to crew members. It starts with a crew base and adds all

the feasible flight legs according to the specified rules. It finally ends up at the same crew base

from which it started. A pairing satisfying all the rules and regulations is called a legal pairing.

The length of a pairing depends on the airline and union regulations. A pairing may span from one

to five days. Some of the rules in generating the feasible pairings include the total daily flight time,

and minimum and maximum sit-connection times. All possible feasible pairings are generated

during this phase. For large airlines with many daily flights, the number of pairings generated

becomes very large (billions of legal pairings!). This is especially very applicable to airlines with

large hubs. Each flight leg at this hub can be potentially paired with many departing flights. This

combination is compounded if the aircraft is rerouted to the hub several times in a day. In such

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cases, the generators are normally equipped with some extra rules and filters to identify and select

good potential pairings. Barnhart (2008) and Klabjan (2003) provide an overview of these rules

and filters to reduce the number of pairings.

Crew Rostering

Once the crew pairing problem is solved, the second phase is crew rostering. Crew rostering is the

process of assigning individual crew members to crew pairings, usually on a monthly basis. Some

airlines, mainly European, allow their crews to select a number of pairings as identified in the first

phase, together with rest periods on specific days to construct their monthly personalized. The

airline then attempts to grant these schedules if possible. Crew training days, seniority, and other

internal regulations are some of the factors that influence the assignment of these schedules to

crews.

US Airlines, however, develop their monthly crew schedules based on the solutions generated in
the crew-pairing phase, independent of crew desires. This approach is then used to construct the
monthly schedule by incorporating employee time off, training, union rules, and other contractual
obligations. The airlines then assign crews to these schedules based on their in-house priority
system. This method, where the employees bid for pre-constructed rosters, is referred to as a bid
line procedure. In both rostering systems, the objective is to maximize crew utilization, evenly
distributing individual crew workload and rest times.

Since the rules and regulations vary among the airlines, the crew rostering process, and the
available literature on this topic, is also diverse. Some of these methods include:

 assigning high priority employees to high priority pairings;

 developing monthly rosters for individual crew members based on their requests;

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  developing monthly rosters for each day of the month without considering the crew
requests.

It should be noted that the processes of assigning cockpit-aircrew members (captain and first
officer) and cabin-aircrew members (flight attendants) are typically different. The cockpit aircrew
members usually have the required licenses/type ratings to fly only a specific fleet of aircraft, while
cabin aircrew members can be assigned to multiple fleet types.

For presentation purposes, and in an effort to keep the rostering problem to a manageable size, we
will develop the rosters on a weekly basis, instead of monthly rosters which are more common
among airlines. The process of developing monthly rosters is basically the same as that of one
done weekly.

Manpower Planning

An airline’s product is measured by its timeliness, accuracy, functionality, quality, and price. The

airline employees and equipment are the factors that determine such measures. Manpower

planning for airlines represents one of the most important and challenging tasks, covering a wide

range spanning from hiring, training, to scheduling of human resources. The concepts of hiring

and training are normally very much dependent on the airline strategic plans. Manpower

scheduling refers to the actual workplan including working, non-working days, times, shifts,

locations, and leave periods. Scheduling the employees for an airline is an enormous task. There

are pilots, flight attendants, ground crew, baggage handlers, reservationists, cooks, janitors,

mechanics, administrators, and so on. The main purpose of manpower scheduling is to derive a

cyclic (normally weekly) plan for each employee so that the total manpower costs are minimized,

efficiency and utilization are maximized, subject to meeting the requirements and regulations, on

crew scheduling, presented the process of assigning flight crews to flight legs. Simulation models

are also used to plan for manpower planning.

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