Mathematical modeling in the airline industry: optimizing aircraft assignment for on-demand air transport

Abstract

This paper addresses a problem faced by air companies that offer on-demand
flight services. Given a list of flight requests, the company has to assign its aircrafts to these requests, so that operational costs are minimized. The main issue in this planning process regards the repositioning of aircrafts when they are not available at the airports of customer departure. The cost of this repositioning should be the least possible, as customers pay proportionally to their requested flights only. We propose an optimization model to support decision making in these situations. Computational experiments with real-life data provided by an on-demand air transport company indicate that the proposed model is appropriate
and may significantly reduce the time spent on repositioning flights.