A Stochastic Programming Model for Integrated Planning of Re-fleeting and Financial Hedging Under Fuel Price and Demand Uncertainty

Because fuel costs have grown to the largest part of airlines’ expenditures and the fluctuation of fuel prices is very high, airlines have to cope with growing uncertainty. Fleet assignment highly influences the fuel consumption of an airline. But the assignment has to be done under fuel price uncertainty. We present a two-stage stochastic optimization model for re-fleeting under fuel price and demand uncertainty. We show that the optimal fleet assignment depends on the fuel price. As a novelty this re-fleeting model integrates financial hedging to decrease the solutions’ risk. This integrated approach dominates traditional non-integrated planning.