Airline schedule planning: A review and future directions

Abdelrahman E.E. Eltoukhy, Tung Sun Chan, Sai Ho Chung

Research output: Journal article publicationReview articleAcademic researchpeer-review

63 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is twofold: first to carry out a comprehensive literature review for state of the art regarding airline schedule planning and second to identify some new research directions that might help academic researchers and practitioners. Design/methodology/approach - The authors mainly focus on the research work appeared in the last three decades. The search process was conducted in database searches using four keywords: "Flight scheduling," "Fleet assignment," "Aircraft maintenance routing" (AMR), and "Crew scheduling". Moreover, the combination of the keywords was used to find the integrated models. Any duplications due to database variety and the articles that were written in non-English language were discarded. Findings - The authors studied 106 research papers and categorized them into five categories. In addition, according to the model features, subcategories were further identified. Moreover, after discussing up-to-date research work, the authors suggested some future directions in order to contribute to the existing literature. Research limitations/implications - The presented categories and subcategories were based on the model characteristics rather than the model formulation and solution methodology that are commonly used in the literature. One advantage of this classification is that it might help scholars to deeply understand the main variation between the models. On the other hand, identifying future research opportunities should help academic researchers and practitioners to develop new models and improve the performance of the existing models. Practical implications - This study proposed some considerations in order to enhance the efficiency of the schedule planning process practically, for example, using the dynamic Stackelberg game strategy for market competition in flight scheduling, considering re-fleeting mechanism under heterogeneous fleet for fleet assignment, and considering the stochastic departure and arrival times for AMR. Originality/value - In the literature, all the review papers focused only on one category of the five categories. Then, this category was classified according to the model formulation and solution methodology. However, in this work, the authors attempted to propose a comprehensive review for all categories for the first time and develop new classifications for each category. The proposed classifications are hence novel and significant.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1201-1243
Number of pages43
JournalIndustrial Management and Data Systems
Volume117
Issue number6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2017

Keywords

  • Aircraft maintenance routing
  • Crew scheduling
  • Fleet assignment
  • Flight scheduling

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Management Information Systems
  • Industrial relations
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Strategy and Management
  • Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

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