Airline Schedule Planning Decisions

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Airline Schedule Planning Decisions

Abdelghany, Ahmed / Abdelghany, Khaled

The airline schedule planning involves developing the flight schedule for a future operation horizon. It also involves developing the schedule of all resources (i.e. aircraft, gates, crew, and airport personnel) used to support the flight operation. To accomplish this task, several subtasks are considered in the airline schedule planning process. This chapter discusses these subtasks that include demand forecasting, competition analysis, determining flight frequencies, determining flight departure times, and identifying flight seat capacities. The main challenge of the airline schedule planning process lies in understanding the interdependence and relationships among the different decisions involved in this process. A change in one of these planning decisions could result in a significant impact on other decisions. This dependability complicates the schedule planning process and usually requires examining the effect of these decisions iteratively. The chapter provides several examples to illustrate the relationships among these decisions.