Airline Strategic Fleet Planning Framework

Abstract

This paper developed an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)-based framework to quantify influential key aspects, namely operation, economy, and environment that greatly affect airline fleet planning decision-making. The developed framework is embedded with a traveler mode choice modeling process in order to capture supply-demand interaction explicitly under uncertainty. It is beneficial to the airline management to allocate flexibly appropriate weight (priority) on the respective key aspect for fleet planning purposes. By investigating Malaysia Airlines and AirAsia as a realistic case study, the findings reveal that the developed framework is useful to: (1) capture and quantify influential key aspects mathematically in making strategic fleet planning, (2) assure adequate fleet supply of airline to meet stochastic demand, (3) model supply-demand interaction in greater details, (4) maximize the operational profit of the airline at a desired service level, (5) provide a greater flexibility to the airline to acquire/lease aircraft throughout the long-term planning horizon.