Abstract
Standard scheduled flight block time (SBT) setting is of great concern for Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) and airlines in China. However, the standard scheduled flight block times are set in the form of on-site meetings in practice and current literature has not provided any efficient mathematical models to calculate the flight block times fairly among the airlines. The objective of this paper is to develop and solve a mathematical model for standard SBT setting with consideration of both fairness and reliability. We use whale optimization algorithm (WOA) and an improved version of the whale optimization algorithm (IWOA) to solve the SBT setting problem. A novel nonlinear update equation of convergence factor for random iterations is used in place of the original linear one in the proposed IWOA algorithm. Experimental results show that the suggested approach is effective, and IWOA performs better than WOA in the concerned problem, whose solutions are better compared to the flight block times released by CAAC. In particular, it is interesting to find that MSE, RMSE, MAE, MAPE and Theil of the reliability in 60%–70% range are always the smallest and the average fairness of airlines is better than that of 60%–75% range. The model and solving approach presented in this article have great potential to be applied by CAAC to determine the standard SBTs strategically.
Highlights
According to the statistical report published by Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), the number of flights in China increased by 3.093 million (36.1%) from 2015 to 2019. e rapid growth of air transportation demand has led to a serious issue of flight delays.e statistics show that there were 2.358 million departure flights in China out of 18.8 million all over the world and China ranked second in terms of the number of flights in the first half of 2019
It is recognized that the factors affecting on-time performance could be mitigated by adjustments in standard scheduled block time (SBT), which is defined as the time interval between scheduled gate departure at the departure airport and scheduled gate arrival at the arrival airport for a given flight [1]
We discuss research papers related to the relationship of standard SBT and on-time performance. en, we present the fairness metric of slot scheduling, which is similar to flight block time scheduling and reliability metric after the first part, and the research gaps are summarized in the end
Summary
According to the statistical report published by CAAC, the number of flights in China increased by 3.093 million (36.1%) from 2015 to 2019. e rapid growth of air transportation demand has led to a serious issue of flight delays. E Operation Monitoring Center of CAAC holds a civil aviation advance flight planning meeting that convenes the employees of the Marketing and Sales Committee (MSC) from all airlines in China to adjust the standard SBTs. e meeting usually takes 2 to 3 days. To the best of our knowledge, there is no such research that uses mathematical modelling methods to set SBTs. is paper aims to propose an optimization method to set SBTs of all airport pairs using various aircraft types in different air seasons more efficiently and reliably. March 25, 2018–October 27, 2018 (air season 7) October 28, 2018–March 30, 2019 (air season 8)
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