Low-carbon airline fleet assignment: A compromise approach

Commercial airlines need to balance their environmental footprint with operational cost when managing the assignment of aviation fleets. These assignments are typically made under uncertainty in terms of their cost (change in labor cost, fuel prices, etc.) and impact on the environment (weather, rules and regulations, etc.). Trade-offs of this kind are complicated, and often result in sub-optimal decisions. In this paper, by considering random demand, fare price and avgas price, the authors propose a multi-criteria method to solve fleet assignment problems. It involves the use of an objective, such as minimizing emission cost or maximizing profit, as a target or a level of aspiration, and the construction of a solution that deviates least from the given target in the L2-norm. The authors discuss the theoretical advantage of this approach and assess its performance using benchmark data on two test cases--Jetstar Asia, and a major Chinese airline. The Jetstar Asia case is first used to test the effectiveness of this approach in balancing profit against emission by employing an integrated form of simulated and open-source acquisition data. For the case of the Chinese airline, the authors develop a simple rounding algorithm to deal with the large-scale problem. All cases exhibited the superiority of the compromise approach over the linear-weighted-sum method in terms of accessing the utopia point in discrete objective space. An out-of-sample test revealed the vicinity of the compromise solutions to the Pareto solutions. The method also yielded better assignment than the airline's existing strategy in terms of both profit and emissions reduction.

• Record URL:
  • https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jairtraman.2017.04.005
• Record URL:
  • http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969699716303568
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/oclc/31005945
• Supplemental Notes:
  • Abstract reprinted with permission of Elsevier.
• Authors:
  • Ma, Qiuzhuo
  • Song, Haiqing
  • Zhu, Wenbin
• Publication Date: 2018-5

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Features: Appendices; Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: pp 86-102
• Serial:
  • Journal of Air Transport Management
  • Volume: 68
  • Issue Number: 0
  • Publisher: Elsevier
  • ISSN: 0969-6997
  • Serial URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/09696997

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Airlines; Environmental impacts; Greenhouse gases; Pollutants; Vehicle fleets
• Subject Areas: Aviation; Environment; Operations and Traffic Management;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01671157
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: May 30 2018 4:34PM