An airline scheduling model and solution algorithms under stochastic demands

When setting a good flight schedule airlines not only have to consider their fleet supply and related operations, as well as market share, but also stochastic variations caused by daily passenger demands in actual operations. Most of the past research on short-term flight scheduling has used the average passenger demand as input to produce the final timetable and schedule, which means that daily passenger variations that occur in actual operations are neglected. To consider such stochastic disturbances we developed a stochastic-demand scheduling model. We employed arc-based and route-based strategies to develop two heuristic algorithms that can be used to solve the model. The test results, based on a major Taiwan airline’s operation, show the good performance of the model and the solution algorithms.