Considering Competition to Solve a Flight Schedule and Aircraft Routing Problem for Small Airlines
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Abstract
For the case of low-cost airlines, which are characterized by having a single fleet with a small number of airplanes, in
a previous work, a heuristic algorithm (AFS-MRA) was developed to simultaneously find the flight schedule and the
aircraft routes subject to maintenance constraints. This work advances this algorithm by incorporating competition in
the planning process (MAFS-MRA).
Within a time frame with a given demand data, competition is seen as a game with two players (one airline and all its
competitors), where the strategies are all the potential origin-destinations that could be included in the flight schedule,
and the payment matrix contains the objective function coefficients that depend on the market share and the routes
previously selected.
Numerical experimentation was undertaken using real data for the case of two airlines that operate at Toluca
International Airport in Mexico. It was found that, by considering competition, the occupation improves to 3% and that
the number of flights required to satisfy the demand was reduced to 21%. Besides, the updating process reduces the
profit computation error in almost 80%, as compared to the real market behavior for the period under study.