Intelligent Flight Scheduling for Transit Passengers by Introducing New Flights in Hub-and-Spoke Network

Abstract

Passenger demand in the aviation industry is growing exponentially flight schedules are of paramount importance for airlines and airports and resources must be used efficiently. Flight scheduling is more complex in the hub-and-spoke (HS) network in which transit passengers visit more than one airport to reach their final destination An airline’s most important asset is its aircraft and the decision that most directly concerns aircraft utilization is its schedule. Mathematical models are proposed with the aim of minimizing passenger waiting time and fulfilling available flight seat capacity for scheduled flights. The first mathematical model assigns transit passengers to scheduled flights to ensure the minimum waiting time. In the case of excess demand a new flight has introduced the schedule without disrupting the scheduled flights so as to provide the shortest waiting time for the remaining transit passengers in the second mathematical model. This article contributes to the flight scheduling literature by providing an objective of considering minimizing transit passenger waiting time and launching a minimum number of new flights at the same time in the HS network. The computational experiment is conducted to represent the verification of mathematical models. © 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.