Airline schedule planning: a review and future directions
| Pages | 1201-1243 |
| Date | 10 July 2017 |
| Published date | 10 July 2017 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/IMDS-09-2016-0358 |
| Author | Abdelrahman E.E. Eltoukhy,Felix T.S. Chan,S.H. Chung |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information systems,Data management systems,Knowledge management,Knowledge sharing,Management science & operations,Supply chain management,Supply chain information systems,Logistics,Quality management/systems |
Airline schedule planning: a
review and future directions
Abdelrahman E.E. Eltoukhy, Felix T.S. Chan and S.H. Chung
Department of Industrial and System Engineering,
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Hong Kong
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is twofold: first to carry out a comprehensive literature review for state
of the art regarding airline schedule planning and second to identify some new research directions that might
help academic researchers and practitioners.
Design/methodology/approach –The authors mainly focus on the research work appeared in the
last three decades. The search process was conducted in database searches using four keywords:
“Flight scheduling,”“Fleet assignment,”“Aircraft maintenance routing”(AMR), and “Crew scheduling”.
Moreover, the combination of the keywords was used to find the integrated models. Any duplications due
to database variety and the articles that were written in non-English language were discarded.
Findings –The authors studied 106 research papers and categorized them into five categories. In addition,
according to the model features, subcategories were further identified. Moreover, after discussing up-to-date
research work, the authors suggested some future directions in order to contribute to the existing literature.
Research limitations/implications –The presented categories and subcategories were based on the
model characteristics rather than the model formulation and solution methodology that are commonly used in
the literature. One advantage of this classification is that it might help scholars to deeply understand the
main variation between the models. On the other hand, identifying future research opportunities should
help academic researchers and practitioners to develop new models and improve the performance of the
existing models.
Practical implications –This study proposed some considerations in order to enhance the efficiency of the
schedule planning process practically, for example, using the dynamic Stackelberg game strategy for market
competition in flight scheduling, considering re-fleeting mechanism under heterogeneous fleet for fleet
assignment, and considering the stochastic departure and arrival times for AMR.
Originality/value –In the literature, all the review papers focused only on one category of the five
categories. Then, this category was classified according to the model formulation and solution methodology.
However, in this work, the authors attempted to propose a comprehensive reviewfor all categories for the first
time and develop new classifications for each category. The proposed classifications are hence novel
and significant.
Keywords Aircraft maintenance routing, Crew scheduling, Fleet assignment, Flight scheduling
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
The airline industry is characterized by tight competitive market, high operational cost,
variable passenger demand, heavy traffic, and strong regulations. In this situation, airline
companies have to efficiently manage their resources that include flights, aircraft, and crews
(Sherali et al., 2013a). In order to manage these resources, airline schedule planning problems
are solved by the airline companies, while considering the vast number of regulations
related to aircraft and crews that result in complex and nontractable problems.
Consequently, airline scheduling is decomposed into four stages: the flight scheduling
problem (FSP), the fleet assignment problem (FAP), the aircraft maintenance
routing problem (AMRP), and finally the crew scheduling problem (CSP). Traditionally,
these problems are solved sequentially, where the solution in each stage is used as an input
for the subsequent stage, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1 describes the sequential operations that take place before the departure of an
aircraft. At the beginning, the flight schedule is constructed considering marketing issues
such as passenger demand and ticket price(Yan et al., 2007; Lee et al., 2007). Thereafter,each
flight is coveredby the specific aircraft type, and feasiblemaintenance routes are constructed
Industrial Management & Data
Systems
Vol. 117 No. 6, 2017
pp. 1201-1243
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0263-5577
DOI 10.1108/IMDS-09-2016-0358
Received 6 September 2016
Revised 26 October 2016
Accepted 27 October 2016
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0263-5577.htm
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Airline
schedule
planning
for each fleet. These two steps are performed by fleet assignment (Rexing et al., 2000;
Barnhart et al., 2002; Barnhart et al., 2009) and aircraft maintenance routing (AMR)
(Gopalan and Talluri, 1998; Sriram and Haghani, 2003; Sarac et al., 2006; Başdere and Bilge,
2014). In the last stage,cabin crew and cockpit are assigned to each flight in order to form an
anonymous pairing,while satisfying the regulationsand contractual issues (Vanceet al., 1997;
Ehrgott and Ryan,2002; Zeghal and Minoux, 2006;Muter et al., 2013). The generated pairings
are grouped in order to form personal rosters, considering vacations and crew requests.
Although thereare interrelations between eachstage, they are usually solved sequentiallydue
to their complexity.The sequential approachleads to suboptimality solution,which means the
solution is optimalin one stage and not in others. In order to avoid this problem,scholars now
pay much attention to solving more integrated airline scheduling models so as to ameliorate
the solution quality and the anticipated profit of the airline companies (Mercier et al., 2005;
Haouari et al., 2009; Sherali et al., 2013b; Cacchiani and Salazar-González, 2016). The airline
scheduleplanning process is one of the challenging processesfaced by airline companies since
the vast number of regulations and rules need to be considered for each resource in
the process.For aircraft, the maintenance requirements and numberof flying hours should be
satisfied during the planning. For crew members, union rules, restrictions on the flying
time, and contractual issues should be respected in the planning process.
In the literature, it is observed that there is no effort can be found to cover all the stages
of airline schedule planning. Most of contributions focus on one stage only, as shown by
Etschmaier and Mathaisel (1985), Sherali et al. (2006), and Gopalakrishnan and Johnson
(2005) who focused on flight scheduling, fleet assignment, and crew scheduling,
respectively. In these studies, the focused stage was classified according to the model
formulation and solution methodology, which make it hard to relate and understand the
main operational features of each research work. As a result, there is general lack of
comprehensive view that considers all the stages of airline schedule planning and discusses
their features and operational considerations. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on the
nature of the problem and its operational considerations and classify each stage based on
the problem characteristics rather than solution methodology and formulation methods.
The main benefit of this classification over existing classification lies in its ability to give
precise and in-depth sub-categories of each problem in airline schedule planning, thereby
providing an insight into the progress of this field. So, the major contribution of this paper is
to fill this gap and to facilitate the future work in this topic through two steps: first by
providing a map of what has been done in airline schedule planning by presenting an
overview of the current state of the art regarding airline schedule planning processes and
second by identifying some fertile opportunities for future research for researchers who are
interested in the airline schedule planning field.
The remaining of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, the research method is
described. In Section 3, the flight scheduling is presented. Section 4 presents the FAP.
In Section 5, we describe the AMRP. The CSP and its corresponding problems are discussed
in Section 6. In Section 7, we survey the integrated airline schedule planning models. Finally,
some concluding remarks and future research directions are presented in Section 8.
Aircraft Maintenance Routing
Crew Scheduling
Fleet Assignment
Flight Scheduling
Figure 1.
The airline schedule
planning processes
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2. Research method
2.1 Source of literature
The main objective of this research work is to provide an overview of the current state
of the art regarding airline scheduling planning processes and identify some new research
directions. In order to achieve this goal, we searched using three main sources: ScienceDirect
–Online Journals by Elsevier Science, Emerald, and Springer LINK Online Libraries.
This survey is conducted based on articles in top journals, limited number of conference
proceeding, handbooks, and theses.
As we mentioned that we need to provide a comprehensive survey for airline schedule
planning, we mainly focused on the papers published in the last three decades. Moreover,
any paper that cited significant contribution and out of this time frame is added to our
survey, in order to enrich our review paper.
We conducted the search process using four keywords: “Flight scheduling,”“Fleet
assignment,”“AMR,”and “Crew scheduling”in all database listed above. Moreover, we
searched by using combination of keywords in order to find the integrated airline schedule
planning models. During our search process, the papers were screened based on their
quality, which was determined according to the impact factor of the journal, the total
number of citations, and the journal ranking. In fact, our screening process was limited to
the journals ranked as Q1, Q2, and Q3. In particular, we read each of the screened papers
and added any new article that did not appear in our first search. This allowed us to collect
up-to-date research in our field. Any duplications due to database overlap and non-English
language papers were discarded. Also, any paper that matched with the keywords but
whose scope was not relevant to our categories was rejected.
The approach adopted in this paper is similar to the ones used by Martínez-Costa et al. (2014)
and Chung et al. (2015) who provided a review for strategic capacity planning in manufacturing
and disruption management in airline operations, respectively.
After making that search, 116 articles were left, among which, there were 113 journal
papers, one conference proceeding, one book chapter, and one thesis. In fact, the journal
papers came from 27 different journals, even though 75 percent of them came from top
journals, as shown in Table I. Table I illustrates the journal used in the literature survey,
the number of papers picked from each journal, the impact factor of each journal, and the
number of citation. The content of this table indicates how good the papers are, as most of
the papers came from top journals in the airline transportation planning.
2.2 The philosophy of the review work
The review work was conducted by following these four steps:
(1) identify the relevant literature concerning the airline schedule planning, and identify
how different classes of problems varied in terms of operational considerations;
Journal Number of papers Impact factor Total citation Journal ranking
Transportation Science 34 3.295 3,945 Q1
European Journal of Operational Research 18 2.679 31,744 Q1
Operations Research 10 1.777 10,200 Q2
Computers & Operations Research 10 1.988 7,545 Q1
Management Science 4 2.741 22,776 Q1
Transportation Research Part B 4 3.769 7,358 Q1
Transportation Research Part A 3 1.994 5,024 Q2
Computers & Industrial Engineering 2 2.086 6,357 Q2
Transportation Research Part C 1 3.075 4,153 Q1
Note: The data collected in this table delivered from ISI web of knowledge
Table I.
The features of the
journals used in the
literature survey
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schedule
planning
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