Özet:
In hub and spoke airline networks, flight arrivals and departures generally have a
bank structure to increase connections among spoke cities through a hub airport in
order to provide cheaper service for higher volumes of air traffic. Main objective of
this thesis is to determine that routes in the banks are planned with the correct
aircraft type, right departure and arrival time so as to maximize the passenger flow
and the revenue flow of all destinations across the network and to fit the slot
capacity of hub airport. In the first part of this thesis, Airline planning process and
its subproblems are defined. Airline bank optimization problem which is a
particular flight scheduling problem is introduced. A mathematical model is
formulated for improving connection times among connecting flights by changing
departure or arrival times of flights in a bank structure. The mathematical model
aims to minimise the total waiting times for transfer passengers and generates flight
schedules regarding slot constraints in the hub airports. Since the problem is NPhard, Simulated annealing and the tabu search algorithms are adopted to solve the
bank optimization problem. A real-world application with a major Turkish carrier
dataset which has a bank structure that connects Middle East and Europe flights is
presented. The comparative results are promising for the airlines bank structure
optimization. In the second part of this thesis, airline bank optimization problem is
integrated with fleet assignment problem. A particular flight scheduling problem is
combined with a strategic airline planning problem concurrently in the airline
industry. It has been aimed to provide clean-state schedules instead of providing
incremental update. Lastly, real-world case study is repeated using the same dataset
for bank optimization to exhibit the competence of the integrated model on
generating schedules that outperform existing schedules.
