Aircraft Maintenance Routing Problem – A Literature Survey

The airline industry has shown significant growth in the last decade according to some indicators such as annual average growth in global air traffic passenger demand and growth rate in the global air transport fleet. This inevitable progress makes the airline industry challenging and forces airline companies to produce a range of solutions that increase consumer loyalty to the brand. These solutions to reduce the high costs encountered in airline operations, prevent delays in planned departure times, improve service quality, or reduce environmental impacts can be diversified according to the need. Although one can refer to past surveys, it is not sufficient to cover the rich literature of airline scheduling, especially for the last decade. This study aims to fill this gap by reviewing the airline operations related papers published between 2009 and 2019, and focus on the ones especially in the aircraft maintenance routing area which seems a promising branch

D3.1 High-level modelling requirements

This document provides all the necessary high-level modelling requirements needed for the proper development of the BEACON project. Firstly, it defines an assessment framework for the performance evaluation of the different flight prioritisations mechanisms selected. The suggested framework is based on a combination of desk research and consultation with different air traffic management (ATM) stakeholder representatives. Secondly, it provides a detailed and exhaustive review of the flight prioritisation and trajectory allocation mechanisms proposed in the literature, ultimately identifying and selecting a final set of promising concepts to improve the performance of the ATM system in situations of demand-capacity constraints, to be included in BEACON simulations. Finally, it describes the different variables and parameters that are part of the possible simulation scenarios and selects the potentially most interesting combinations to measure the performance of the proposed prioritisation mechanisms

A review of revenue management : recent generalizations and advances in industry applications

Originating from passenger air transport, revenue management has evolved into a general and indispensable methodological framework over the last decades, comprising techniques to manage demand actively and to further improve companies’ profits in many different industries. This article is the second and final part of a paper series surveying the scientific developments and achievements in revenue management over the past 15 years. The first part focused on the general methodological advances regarding choice-based theory and methods of availability control over time. In this second part, we discuss some of the most important generalizations of the standard revenue management setting: product innovations (opaque products and flexible products), upgrading, overbooking, personalization, and risk-aversion. Furthermore, to demonstrate the broad use of revenue management, we survey important industry applications beyond passenger air transportation that have received scientific attention over the years, covering air cargo, hotel, car rental, attended home delivery, and manufacturing. We work out the specific revenue management-related challenges of each industry and portray the key contributions from the literature. We conclude the paper with some directions for future research

Engage D5.6 Thematic challenge briefing notes (1st and 2nd releases)

Engage identified four thematic challenges to address research topics not contemporaneously (sufficiently) addressed by SESAR. This deliverable serves primarily as a record of the two sets of released thematic challenge briefing notes

Polynomial approximation method for stochastic programming.

Two stage stochastic programming is an important part in the whole area of stochastic programming, and is widely spread in multiple disciplines, such as financial management, risk management, and logistics. The two stage stochastic programming is a natural extension of linear programming by incorporating uncertainty into the model. This thesis solves the two stage stochastic programming using a novel approach. For most two stage stochastic programming model instances, both the objective function and constraints are convex but non-differentiable, e.g. piecewise-linear, and thereby solved by the first gradient-type methods. When encountering large scale problems, the performance of known methods, such as the stochastic decomposition (SD) and stochastic approximation (SA), is poor in practice. This thesis replaces the objective function and constraints with their polynomial approximations. That is because polynomial counterpart has the following benefits: first, the polynomial approximation will preserve the convexity; Second, the polynomial approximation will uniformly converge to the original objective/constraints with arbitrary accuracy; and third, the polynomial approximation will not only provide good estimation on the original objectives/functions but also their gradients/sub-gradients. All these features enable us to apply convex optimization techniques for large scale problems. Hence, the thesis applies SAA, polynomial approximation method and then steepest descent method in combination to solve the large-scale problems effectively and efficiently

The hidden cost of uncertainty for airspace users

This article highlights the importance of uncertainty in day-to-day operations, and the need to take it into account to properly assess the cost of delay for airspace users. It defines a cost of uncertainty and estimates it using real data. It provides some easily computable models based on the average and standard deviation of delay to estimate the cost of delay in general. The article shows that uncertainty is also important in the formulation of buffers for airlines and provides a simple model to estimate the optimal assignment, further using real data to compute the optimal value at different airports