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1 – 10 of over 4000
Article
Publication date: 13 December 2022

Kejia Chen, Jintao Chen, Lixi Yang and Xiaoqian Yang

Flights are often delayed owing to emergencies. This paper proposes a cooperative slot secondary assignment (CSSA) model based on a collaborative decision-making (CDM) mechanism…

Abstract

Purpose

Flights are often delayed owing to emergencies. This paper proposes a cooperative slot secondary assignment (CSSA) model based on a collaborative decision-making (CDM) mechanism, and the operation mode of flight waves designs an improved intelligent algorithm to solve the optimal flight plan and minimize the total delay of passenger time.

Design/methodology/approach

Taking passenger delays, transfer delays and flight cancellation delays into account comprehensively, the total delay time is minimized as the objective function. The model is verified by a linear solver and compared with the first come first service (FCFS) method to prove the effectiveness of the method. An improved adaptive partheno-genetic algorithm (IAPGA) using hierarchical serial number coding was designed, combining elite and roulette strategies to find pareto solutions.

Findings

Comparing and analyzing the experimental results of various scale examples, the optimization model in this paper is greatly optimized compared to the FCFS method in terms of total delay time, and the IAPGA algorithm is better than the algorithm before in terms of solution performance and solution set quality.

Originality/value

Based on the actual situation, this paper considers the operation mode of flight waves. In addition, the flight plan solved by the model can be guaranteed in terms of feasibility and effectiveness, which can provide airlines with reasonable decision-making opinions when reassigning slot resources.

Details

International Journal of Intelligent Computing and Cybernetics, vol. 16 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1756-378X

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 22 June 2022

Xiaopeng Liu

To reduce the time of flight rescheduling, reduce the total delay cost of all flights to a minimum and put forward more references for passengers to take flights, this paper aims…

Abstract

Purpose

To reduce the time of flight rescheduling, reduce the total delay cost of all flights to a minimum and put forward more references for passengers to take flights, this paper aims to mainly study the recovery of flights affected by snow disaster within the minimum delay time.

Design/methodology/approach

The temporal and spatial network flight recovery model is used to optimize all flights of various types of aircraft, and the adjusted flight schedule based on minute delay time is obtained. In addition, for passenger travel flights, the impact of passenger delay cost on the total delay time is minimized as an objective function to calculate the passenger delay cost.

Findings

In this paper, the actual departure time of aircraft is sorted in ascending order. Up to five planes can take off from the runway every 5 min, and the 10-min decision interval is successively delayed. The actual arrival time is sorted by the same method and the sequential delay is calculated to obtain the adjusted flight schedule. As a result, it takes less time to reschedule flights.

Originality/value

In this paper, heuristic algorithm is used to adjust the schedule of delayed flights flexibly, which is convenient for manual modification. This decision method has good robustness and can partially adjust the interrupted flights without affecting other scheduled flights while maintaining the stable operation of the whole plan, greatly improving the efficiency of civil aviation operations and reducing the impact of flight delays.

Details

Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, vol. 95 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1748-8842

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 13 November 2017

Carl E. Enomoto, Karl R. Geisler and Sajid A. Noor

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the extent to which major US airlines respond to one another in quality of service improvements.

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the extent to which major US airlines respond to one another in quality of service improvements.

Design/methodology/approach

Utilizing monthly data, the authors estimate a five-equation vector autoregressive model to determine which airline leads or follows others in quality of service improvements.

Findings

This study found that the five major airlines make interrelated decisions when responding to customer complaints concerning flight problems, over-sales, reservations, ticketing, boarding, and customer service. Every airline either responds to or influences the changes in customer complaints faced by at least one other airline, while some airlines do both. However, only one such relationship was found when examining if airlines change the percent of flight delays they have control over in response to changes in flight delays faced by another airline.

Practical implications

The number of passenger complaints against an airline can be influenced by the airline, as can the number of carrier-caused flight delays. The industry leaders in responsiveness to consumer complaints are US Airways and United. However, airlines do not, as a group, respond to the carrier-caused delays of their competitors. The prescription to improve airline service vis-à-vis flight delays is simple: tell passengers why flights are delayed. To protect or gain market share, airlines would compete for customers by minimizing flight delays in a similar manor to how they respond to customer complaints.

Originality/value

No other paper that the authors are aware of has addressed the issue of identifying leaders and followers in the US airline industry regarding changes in service quality as reflected by changes in passenger complaints and flight delays.

Details

Journal of Economic Studies, vol. 44 no. 6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-3585

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 24 August 2022

Amir Khiabani, Alireza Rashidi Komijan, Vahidreza Ghezavati and Hadi Mohammadi Bidhandi

Airline scheduling is an extremely complex process. Moreover, disruption in a single flight may damage the entire schedule tremendously. Using an efficient recovery scheduling…

Abstract

Purpose

Airline scheduling is an extremely complex process. Moreover, disruption in a single flight may damage the entire schedule tremendously. Using an efficient recovery scheduling strategy is vital for a commercial airline. The purpose of this paper is to present an integrated aircraft and crew recovery plans to reduce delay and prevent delay propagation on airline schedule with the minimum cost.

Design/methodology/approach

A mixed-integer linear programming model is proposed to formulate an integrated aircraft and crew recovery problem. The main contribution of the model is that recovery model is formulated based on individual flight legs instead of strings. This leads to a more accurate schedule and better solution. Also, some important issues such as crew swapping, reassignment of aircraft to other flights as well as ground and sit time requirements are considered in the model. Benders’ decomposition approach is used to solve the proposed model.

Findings

The model performance is also tested by a case including 227 flights, 64 crew, 56 aircraft and 40 different airports from American Airlines data for a 24-h horizon. The solution achieved the minimum cost value in 35 min. The results show that the model has a great performance to recover the entire schedule when disruption happens for random flights and propagation delay is successfully limited.

Originality/value

The authors confirm that this is an original paper and has not been published or under consideration in any other journal.

Details

Journal of Modelling in Management, vol. 18 no. 6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1746-5664

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 7 November 2016

Meng Jia and Yingbao Yang

The purpose of this paper is to study dynamic evolution of passenger emotional contagion among different flights emerging in mass flight delays, so as to quantitatively analyze…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to study dynamic evolution of passenger emotional contagion among different flights emerging in mass flight delays, so as to quantitatively analyze emotional variation tendencies and influences of concerned factors and intervention measures.

Design/methodology/approach

An intervening variable of group emotion was introduced into emotional contagion model to simulate passenger emotional evolution among multi-flight groups. Besides, personalities, characters and social relationships were considered to represent individual differences in emotional changes. Based on personal contact relationships, emotional contagion model was proposed to evaluate cross-emotion transition processes among different groups under scenarios of information shortage. Eventually, evolutionary processes of passenger emotions were fused in an agent-based simulation based on social force correction model.

Findings

Simulation experiment results revealed that passenger emotions suffer from combined impacts of individual emotional changes and emotional interactions among adjacent flights through a comparison with actual survey. Besides, emotional interactions accelerate processes of emotion transitions, and have significant impacts on adjacent flights when different measures are taken. Moreover, taking intervention measures simultaneously seems more effective than implementing intervention successively.

Originality/value

The proposed method makes up for deficiency of ignoring effects of emotional interactions among adjacent flights. It contributes to providing control methods and strategies for relevant departments and improving the efficiency and ability of handling passenger collective events in mass flight delays.

Article
Publication date: 25 June 2019

Murat Guven, Eyup Calik, Basak Cetinguc, Bulent Guloglu and Fethi Calisir

This study aims to investigate the effects of flight delays, distance, number of passengers and seasonality on revenue in the Turkish air transport industry.

Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to investigate the effects of flight delays, distance, number of passengers and seasonality on revenue in the Turkish air transport industry.

Design/methodology/approach

The domestic return routes of a Turkish airline company were examined to address this issue. Among five cities and six airports, 14 major domestic return routes were selected. The augmented mean group (AMG) estimator and common correlated effects mean group (CCEMG) estimator were conducted with a two-way fixed effects (FE) robustness test in this study.

Findings

The results show that arrival flight delay and departure flight delay had negative effects on revenue, whereas the distance between airports, the number of air passengers and seasonality had positive effects on revenue.

Research limitations/implications

The data used in this study were retrieved from a Turkish airline company; for future research, other airline companies operating in Turkey may be included.

Practical implications

These findings could be evaluated by air transportation leaders to provide a guide to make strategic decisions to achieve greater performance in this competitive environment.

Originality/value

The originality of the paper comes from the facts that besides distance and number of passengers, the authors control for the seasonality when assessing the effects of flight delay on revenue; they use panel data techniques, which permit them to control for individual heterogeneity, and create more variability, more efficiency and less collinearity among the variables; they use two recent panel data techniques, CCEMG and AMG, allowing for cross-section dependence.

Details

Kybernetes, vol. 48 no. 9
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0368-492X

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 14 September 2015

S.H. Chung, Ying Kei Tse and T.M. Choi

The purpose of this paper is to carry out a comprehensive review for state-of-the-art works in disruption risk management of express logistics mainly supported by…

2067

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to carry out a comprehensive review for state-of-the-art works in disruption risk management of express logistics mainly supported by air-transportation. The authors aim to suggest some new research directions and insights for express logistics practitioners to develop more robust planning in air-transportation.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors mainly confined the research to papers published over the last two decades. The search process was conducted in two dimensions: horizontal and vertical. In the horizontal dimension, attention was paid to the evolution of disruption management across the timeline. In the vertical dimension, different foci and strategies of disruption management are employed to distinguish each article. Three keywords were used in the full text query: “Disruption management”, “Air transportation”, and “Airline Operations” in all database searches listed above. Duplications due to database overlap, articles other than those from academic journals, and papers in languages other than English were discarded.

Findings

A total of 98 articles were studied. The authors categorized the papers into two broad categories: Reactive Recovery, and Proactive Planning. In addition, based on the problem characteristics and their application scenarios, a total of 11 sub-categories in reactive recovery and nine sub-categories in proactive planning were further identified. From the analysis, the authors identified some new categories in the air-transportation recovery. In addition, by analyzing the papers in robust planning, according to the problem characteristics and the state-of-the-art research in recovery problems, the authors proposed four new research directions to enhance the reliability and robustness of air-transportation express logistics.

Research limitations/implications

This study provided a comprehensive and feasible taxonomy of disruption risk management. The classification scheme was based on the problem characteristics and the application scenarios, rather than the algorithms. One advantage of this scheme is that it enables an in-depth classification of the problem, that is, sub-categories of each class can be revealed, which provides a much wider and clearer horizon to the scientific progress in this area. This helps researchers to reveal the problem’s nature and to identify the future directions more systematically. The suggestions for future research directions also point out some critical research gaps and opportunities.

Practical implications

This study summarized various reasons which account for the disruption in air-transportation. In addition, the authors suggested various considerations for express logistics practitioners to enhance logistics network reliability and efficiency.

Originality/value

There are various classification schemes in the literature to categorize disruption management. Using different algorithms (e.g. exact algorithm, heuristics, meta-heuristics) and distinct characteristics of the problem elements (e.g. aircraft, crew, passengers, etc.) are the most common schemes in previous efforts to produce a disruption management classification scheme. However, the authors herein attempted to focus on the problem nature and the application perspective of disruption management. The classification scheme is hence novel and significant.

Details

Industrial Management & Data Systems, vol. 115 no. 8
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0263-5577

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 12 September 2017

Xavier Fageda and Ricardo Flores-Fillol

We investigate the relationship between airline network structure and airport congestion. More specifically, we study the ways in which airlines adjust capacity to delays

Abstract

We investigate the relationship between airline network structure and airport congestion. More specifically, we study the ways in which airlines adjust capacity to delays depending on the network type they operate. We find some evidence suggesting that airlines operating hub-and-spoke structures react less to delays than airlines operating fully connected configurations. In particular, network airlines have incentives to keep frequency high even if this is at the expense of a greater congestion at their hub airports. We also show that airlines in slot-constrained airports seem to react to higher levels of congestion by using bigger aircraft at lower frequencies; thus, we conclude that conditioning the number of available slots on the levels of delays at the airport seems an effective measure that creates the right incentives for airlines to reduce the congestion they generate.

Details

The Economics of Airport Operations
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78714-497-2

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 12 October 2012

Mingang Gao, Hong Chi, Baoguang Xu and Ruo Ding

The purpose of this paper is to focus on disruption management responding to large‐area flight delays (LFD). It is urgent for airways to reschedule the disrupted flights so as to…

1355

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to focus on disruption management responding to large‐area flight delays (LFD). It is urgent for airways to reschedule the disrupted flights so as to relieve the negative influence and minimize losses. The authors try to reduce the risk of airline company's credit and economic losses by rescheduling flights with mathematic models and algorithm.

Design/methodology/approach

Based on flight classifications of real‐time statuses and priority indicators, all flights are prioritized. In this paper, two mathematic programming models of flight rescheduling are proposed. For the second model, an optimum polynomial algorithm is designed.

Findings

In practice, when LFD happens, it is very important for the airline company to pay attention to real‐time statuses of all the flights. At the same time, the disruption management should consider not only the economic loss but also other non‐quantitative loss such as passengers' satisfaction, etc.

Originality/value

In this paper, two mathematic programming models of flight rescheduling are built. An algorithm is designed and it is proved to be an optimum polynomial algorithm and a case study is given to illustrate the algorithm. The paper provides a theory support for airways to reduce the risk brought by LFD.

Article
Publication date: 26 July 2021

Álvaro Rodríguez-Sanz, Javier Cano and Beatriz Rubio Fernández

Weather events have a significant impact on airport arrival performance and may cause delays in operations and/or constraints in airport capacity. In Europe, almost half of all…

Abstract

Purpose

Weather events have a significant impact on airport arrival performance and may cause delays in operations and/or constraints in airport capacity. In Europe, almost half of all regulated airport traffic delay is due to adverse weather conditions. Moreover, the closer airports operate to their maximum capacity, the more severe is the impact of a capacity loss due to external events such as weather. Various weather uncertainties occurring during airport operations can significantly delay some arrival processes and cause network-wide effects on the overall air traffic management (ATM) system. Quantifying the impact of weather is, therefore, a key feature to improve the decision-making process that enhances airport performance. It would allow airport operators to identify the relevant weather information needed, and help them decide on the appropriate actions to mitigate the consequences of adverse weather events. Therefore, this research aims to understand and quantify the impact of weather conditions on airport arrival processes, so it can be properly predicted and managed.

Design/methodology/approach

This study presents a methodology to evaluate the impact of adverse weather events on airport arrival performance (delay and throughput) and to define operational thresholds for significant weather conditions. This study uses a Bayesian Network approach to relate weather data from meteorological reports and airport arrival performance data with scheduled and actual movements, as well as arrival delays. This allows us to understand the relationships between weather phenomena and their impacts on arrival delay and throughput. The proposed model also provides us with the values of the explanatory variables (weather events) that lead to certain operational thresholds in the target variables (arrival delay and throughput). This study then presents a quantification of the airport performance with regard to an aggregated weather-performance metric. Specific weather phenomena are categorized through a synthetic index, which aims to quantify weather conditions at a given airport, based on aviation routine meteorological reports. This helps us to manage uncertainty at airport arrival operations by relating index levels with airport performance results.

Findings

The results are computed from a data set of over 750,000 flights on a major European hub and from local weather data during the period 2015–2018. This study combines delay and capacity metrics at different airport operational stages for the arrival process (final approach, taxi-in and in-block). Therefore, the spatial boundary of this study is not only the airport but also its surrounding airspace, to take both the arrival sequencing and metering area and potential holding patterns into consideration.

Originality/value

This study introduces a new approach for modeling causal relationships between airport arrival performance indicators and meteorological events, which can be used to quantify the impact of weather in airport arrival conditions, predict the evolution of airport operational scenarios and support airport decision-making processes.

Details

Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, vol. 94 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1748-8842

Keywords

1 – 10 of over 4000