Development of an Aircraft Routing System for an Air Taxi Operator

Abstract

Due to increasing congestion of the road network and the major airports, the established modes of transport like car and scheduled air travel are having difficulty to fulfil the need for efficient business travel. Therefore, recent years have seen a growing demand for business aviation services like business aircraft charter and (fractional) aircraft ownership. These services enable improved time efficiencies, access to a wider range of airports, and the ability to control flight scheduling (Budd & Graham, 2009). However, business aviation is characterized by high prices and due to the economic downturn of 2008 corporate travel departments now seek less costly and more efficient business travel solutions (American Express, 2009; Gall & Hindhaugh, 2009). This has paved the way for the development of a new phenomenon in the air transport industry, namely the on-demand air taxi service. Air taxi operators offer travellers a low fare, on-demand travel service (Budd & Graham, 2009). As such, they provide the flexibility and time efficiency of existing on-demand business aviation, giving them the same time-efficiency advantage over car and scheduled air transport, but at a lower price (Bonnefoy, 2005). One of the key enablers that allows air taxi operators to offer lower fares and still remain profitable is, apart from their smaller and thus cheaper aircraft, the optimization of resources, particularly during the employment of the aircraft during the aircraft routing phase. This chapter therefore sets out to develop an aircraft routing system which allows a full on-demand per-aircraft air taxi company to generate aircraft routing plans which adhere to its planning objectives, during the first operational years. Firstly, the air taxi business model is discussed. Then the aircraft routing problem and modelling approaches are described, followed by the design, testing and validation of the aircraft routing model, after which conclusions on the approach taken are drawn.