Air Cargo Route Network Research Based on Hub-and-Spoke System

Abstract

With continuous economic development, the air cargo plays an increasingly important role in economy. Focusing on the characters of air cargo, air cargo network with hub and spoke structure is built, moreover the airplane type setting and assignment are analyzed as well as flight frequency of the hub. Finally, a practical calculation example is given for analysis. As an advanced transportation mode, air cargo has been undergoing rapid development the recent years. Especially, fueled by fast growth of national economy, air cargo industry in China has gained rapid progress. For example, although the financial crisis brought severe influence in 2009, annual freight turnover of domestic civil aviation reached 12626.736 million tons, which increased 5.6% than that of last year; the cargo freight volume reached 44545.36 million tons, with increase of 9.3%. However, civil aviation in China traditionally put more emphasis on passenger flight than on cargo, consequently there are few theoretical study on air cargo, only Mingguo Bo, Jinfu Zhu and so on did some pure theoretical research on it, but the foreign experts, like O’Kelly, Campbell, they have done a lot work on air cargo. Till now, in the aviation industry, air cargo is widely believed to be one of the new economic growth points of civil aviation in China. Therefore, it is in urgent demand of the study on theory of air cargo (such as frequency of flights, airplane type planning studies).