Airline Systems Research Articles

A multi-perspective functionality loss assessment of coupled railway and airline systems under extreme events

The coupled national-scale railway and airline systems (CRASs) have drastically improved inter-city connectivity and national economics, but they remain susceptible to various extreme events. These events, including flooding and typhoon, often manifest as localized events because all direct interrupted components lie in a small region relative to the large-scale distribution of CRASs. Instead of the hazard-specific modeling of each localized event, this paper introduces four types of localized disruption models to simulate localized events with various locations, impact coverages, and time spans. A multi-perspective framework is then proposed for travel time-based functionality loss assessment of CRASs under localized events. Taking CRASs in China as an application, results demonstrate that (1) the functionality loss is highly sensitive to the event location, and events in areas with more population, higher GDP, and larger transport systems tend to cause higher functionality loss; (2) the impact coverage of events has a limited influence on functionality loss, as critical areas identified under circle-shaped impact coverage keep consistent with those under administrative district-based coverage; (3) the functionality loss and critical areas vary largely with the time span of localized events. The findings provide valuable insights in devising mitigation strategies for CRASs against various extreme events.

ИССЛЕДОВАНИЕ И ОЦЕНКА ВЛИЯНИЯ ПАНДЕМИИ СOVID – 19 НА ПАССАЖИРОПОТОК В АВИАЦИОННОЙ ОТРАСЛИ

This article presents the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on passenger traffic in the aviation industry at the global, Russian and regional levels. International data on airline traffic and passenger traffic at airports are presented. Data on passenger traffic at Pulkovo Airport from 2019 to the present is presented. On the basis of the collected data, graphs of air traffic decline are presented A detailed analysis of passenger traffic flows to domestic and international destinations is performed, and the main development trends are identified. Based on Pulkovo Airport passenger traffic analysis, the main directions are highlighted, and points for passenger traffic increase and recovery of air transport industry in North-West Russia are identified. The presented analytical data is the basis for analysis of the existing route aviation networks, creating the basis for solving the tasks of forecasting development and making decisions on effective expansion of destinations. Despite international restrictions, the expansion of domestic destinations is one of the ways to increase passenger traffic and achieve pre-crisis levels. The analytical bottom line presented is compiled from available airline and airport monitoring information systems.

A Literature Review of Drone-Based Package Delivery Logistics Systems and Their Implementation Feasibility

In recent years, e-commerce businesses have seen an increase in the daily volume of packages to be delivered, as well as an increase in the number of particularly demanding customer expectations. In this respect, the delivery mechanism became prohibitively expensive, particularly for the final kilometer. To stay competitive and meet the increased demand, businesses began to look for innovative autonomous delivery options for the last mile, such as autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles/drones, which are a promising alternative for the logistics industry. Following the success of drones in surveillance and remote sensing, drone delivery systems have begun to emerge as a new solution to reduce delivery costs and delivery time. In the coming years, autonomous drone sharing systems will be an unavoidable logistical solution, especially with the new laws/recommendations introduced by the Flight World Organization on how to organize the operations of these special unmanned airline systems. This paper provides a comprehensive literature survey on a set of relevant research issues and highlights the representative solutions and concepts that have been proposed thus far in the design and modeling of the logistics of drone delivery systems, with the purpose of discussing the respective performance levels reached by the various suggested approaches. Furthermore, the paper also investigates the central problems to be addressed and briefly discusses and outlines a series of interesting new research avenues of relevance for drone-based package delivery systems.

A Network Science-Based Performance Improvement Model for the Airline Industry Using NetworkX

Background: COVID 19 created a challenging situation for many of the industries across the globe. Our primary focus is on the most affected airline industry. In this paper, the connectivity and profits of an airline company were analyzed with the theoretical approach and by proposing a novel model to increase the performance of the above parameters. In our previous work, two airlines were investigated, and it was observed that adding trips to a non-profit airline concerning profit Airlines is one of the optimal techniques to improve the performance. In this paper, multi-airlines have been considered. Methods: In the first step, identify the appropriate data sets for three airline companies and the collected data set in image format, to convert them into graph format consisting of nodes and edges. In the next step, an analysis has been conducted on data set graphs by considering the parameters like diameter, density, average degree, clustering coefficient and the shortest path generated to identify the profitable airlines. The proposed algorithms will apply either trimming or adding operations on lowprofit airline operators with respective profitable airlines. In the last step, the proposed algorithm will generate an output with better connectivity and profits. Results: In this research, other interesting findings, which are relatively contrasted to the previous findings, were observed. In the present research findings, trimming of trips to non-profit airlines concerning the profit airlines can also be an optimal solution for better performance. Discussion: In this research, complex multigraph airlines were analyzed by using the graph analytics technique for the optimum solution. Standard parameters like edges, nodes, degree, clustering, and shortest path on indigo, spice jet, and AirAsia airline systems were also compared. Conclusion: The proposed algorithm analyzes the connectivity of airline systems and applies either trimming or enhancing techniques. Indigo airlines have the best-connected network as compared to the other two models. Trimming operations will be performed on Indigo, whereas on Air Asia and spice jet, both cutting and enhancing will be served.

Comparison of two hybrid algorithms on incorporated aircraft routing and crew pairing problems

<span>In airline operations planning, a sequential method is traditionally used in airline system. In airline systems, minimizing the costs is important as they want to get the highest profits. The aircraft routing problem is solved first, and then pursued by crew pairing problem. The solutions are suboptimal in some cases, so we incorporate aircraft routing and crew pairing problems into one mathematical model to get an exact solution. Before we solve the integrated aircraft routing and crew pairing problem, we need to get the aircraft routes (AR) and crew pairs (CP). In this study, we suggested using genetic algorithm (GA) to develop a set of AR and CP. By using the generated AR and CP, we tackle the integrated aircraft and crew pairing problems using two suggested techniques, Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Computational results show that GA's executed of AR and CP and then solved by ILP obtained the greatest results among all the methods suggested.</span>

A bi-objective hub maximal covering location problem considering time-dependent reliability and the second type of coverage

The hub location problem seeks to find the best location for hubs and the assignment of non-hub nodes to hubs. The hub location problem appears in a variety of applications including airline systems, cargo delivery systems, and telecommunication network design. In this paper, a bi-objective hub maximal covering location problem is presented considering time-dependent reliabilities. The two objective functions are: (i) maximizing the weighted network reliability and (ii) maximizing the total flow in a hub network, where the type of coverage used for locating is the second type. Additionally, the transportation cost between each pair of nodes is assumed to be an uncertain parameter. Chance constrained programming is employed to formulate the bi-objective problem. The model is transformed into a single-objective model using the goal attainment method – a technique in multi-objective decision making procedures. As the problem belongs to the class of NP-hard problems, a genetic algorithm is developed to solve it. Since there is no benchmark available in the literature, a simulated annealing algorithm is developed as well in order to validate the results obtained. The response surface methodology is utilized to tune the parameters of both algorithms in order to find better solutions. Some numerical examples are presented to investigate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms. Finally, the results obtained using the two algorithms are compared by the technique for order preference by similarity to the ideal solution.

Vulnerability analysis of complementary transportation systems with applications to railway and airline systems in China

Most of existing studies on vulnerability analysis of multiple infrastructure systems mainly focus on negative effects of interdependencies, which mean that failures in one system can propagate to other systems and aggravate the initial damage. In reality, there also exist positive effects of interdependencies, which are shown in complementary systems and mean that if one system fails another system can provide alternative services to satisfy customers׳ demands. Different types of transportation systems in a city or country are typical complementary systems. Taking railway and airline systems in China as an example, this paper proposes a network-based approach to model the vulnerability of complementary transportation systems, and based on this model, this paper further introduces a dynamic complementary strength metric, which can help decision makers design or select better complementary topologies from the vulnerability perspective. Also, based on a simple genetic algorithm, this paper analyzes whether critical components for single systems are still important when taking two systems as a whole for analysis. Results show that a protection strategy of hardening a few critical components is also good strategy for the combined system. In addition, the findings and several assumptions are further discussed to close the gap between theory and practice.

Parallelization of Shortest Path Finder on GPU: Floyd-Warshall

The project deals with implementation of Floyd Warshall Algorithm i.e All Pair Shortest Path. This algorithm is implemented using parallel programming concept for faster solution. This is a research based project in which the serial and parallel computations are compared.Floyd Warshall algorithm has overcome the drawbacks of Dijkstra’s and Bellman Ford Algorithm. For parallel programming, the project is implemented using NVIDIA GPU(NVIDIA GeForce 820M , 410M) for which CUDA(CUDA Toolkit 6.0) is used . The purpose of developing this project is to find the shortest path between all the present nodes in a graph.This system is designed to work on a large dataset(set of 48 or 72 or 100 cities).This project can be implemented for Airline Systems,Transportation services, Courier Services, Networking.

A stochastic approach for a novel p-hub location-allocation problem with opening and reopening modes

A hub location problem appears in a variety of applications involving airline systems, cargo delivery systems and telecommunication network design. The plants known as hubs serve client nodes involving hub and spoke nodes. To act optimally plants work through time horizon. Thus, opening, reopening and active modes as well as their operational cost are accounted for. We have a single objective function that minimises the total expected cost. Additionally, to come close more and more to reality, we consider a stochastic environment, in which a scenario-based type is considered and dedicated a specific probability. The experimental results illustrate the impact of the stochastic environment compared to the deterministic one. A stochastic mathematical model yields a less amount of the objective function value compared with the deterministic one. Finally, a wide sensitivity analysis is performed to recognise the impact of the main parameters on the final solutions.

The Proposed Merger of US Airways and American Airlines: The Rush to Closed Airline Systems

Should US Airways make a bid for American Airlines, currently in bankruptcy proceedings, the deal could present a conundrum for antitrust authorities. The transaction would create the largest domestic airline, reducing the number of legacy mega-carriers to three – Delta Air Lines (Delta), United Continental, and US Airways-American Airlines (US Airways-American). This consolidation would occur against an industry backdrop marked by a dwindling fringe of low-cost carriers (LCCs) and growing questions as to whether legacy look-alike Southwest Airlines-AirTran Airways (Southwest) exerts any significant competitive discipline in the industry. The merger could therefore hasten a troubling metamorphosis of the domestic airline industry from one in which hub airports were designed to accommodate multiple, competing airlines to a few large, closed systems that are virtually impermeable to competition and create a hostile environment in which LCCs and regional airlines have difficulty thriving and expanding.This White Paper, produced jointly by the American Antitrust Institute (AAI) and Business Travel Coalition (BTC), asks: What competitive issues should be the focus of antitrust investigators in reviewing the proposed merger of US Airways and American?The paper takes the position that a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation into the proposed merger of US Airways and American should be informed by mounting evidence on the effects of previous airline mergers, namely Delta-Northwest and United- Continental. The White Paper presents a brief analysis of these combinations and highlights a number of preliminary observations that deserve a more in-depth look. These range from the effects of previous mergers on creating costly post-merger integration problems, substantially reducing rivalry on important routes, producing above-average fare increases, and driving traffic to major hubs and away from smaller communities.The White Paper continues on to evaluate key competitive issues raised by the proposed merger of US Airways and American that deserve some attention in an antitrust investigation. One is the expected outcome – similar to previous legacy mergers – that the proposed combination could eliminate competition on a number of important overlap routes, creating very high levels of concentration and potential harm to consumers. The risk that the proposed merger could adversely affect small communities through reduced levels of, or lower quality, air service is also worth a close look. Another observation is that the merger is unlikely to be one of complementary networks (as might be argued) and could instead create regional strongholds and solidify US Airways-American’s control over key airports. Any arguments that the merger is necessary to create another “equal-size” competitor to the existing Big 3 systems are also not compelling. The analysis concludes by examining the potential effect of the merger on buyer market power and disclosure of information regarding ancillary service fees.The joint AAI/BTC White Paper offers a number of concluding observations and recommendations. Among them is that our analysis of the US Airways-American merger– coupled with potential warning signs from previous legacy mergers – indicates that there may be enough smoke surrounding the proposed combination to indicate a potential fire. The merging parties therefore bear a heavy burden is demonstrating that their merger would not be harmful to competition and consumers.

Hub covering location problems with different coverage types

The hub location problem is used for many applications, including cargo delivery systems, airline systems, telecommunication network design and so on. Each area has its own characteristics in hub location. In this paper, we study the hub covering problem with different coverage type over complete hub networks. Furthermore, hub set and maximal covering are expressed with single and multiple allocation strategies. First, a quadratic formulation is proposed for single allocation hub set covering problem. Then a linearization idea is considered for it and applied for multiple allocation hub set, single and multiple allocation hub maximal covering problems. The aim of these models is to find the location of hubs and allocate non-hub nodes to the located hub nodes subject to the travel time (cost or distance) between two nodes in origin-destination doesn’t exceed a given bound. The formulations with this coverage constraint have not been remarked in the literature. Two heuristic procedures are proposed to handle these models in an agreeable solution quality and computational time. The computational experience of Turkish dataset was presented for better illustration of proposed model. And a special application on Iranian hub airports location is discussed.

Main Transportation System Earthquake Damages due to Slope Failure and near Fault Effection in 8.0 Wenchuan Earthquake

A Ms=8.0 earthquake striked the most of the China on May 12th, 2008, and brought about near 90,000 deaths and about 700 billion dollars of direct economic losses. This earthquake impacted all kind of transportation system including highway, railway, airline and water carriage systems in a huge area. This paper provides many records of observed damage to transportation system by site investigation. The seismic performances related to transportation system in meizoseismal zonation were described in details in this paper. Occurring in a mountainous region, this earthquake severely damaged the transportation system because of strong earthquake motion, near the active faults, trigged landslides and debris, rock and soil collapses, and large ground deformation. Transportation system performance degradation was due to not only physical damages of equipments and buildings, but also the shortage of the electric powers and supporting from other lifeline systems. some statitical laws among transportation system , slope failure and fault distance, and some valuable measures for resisting strong earthquake motion, secondary earthquake-induced geological disaster and lessons learned for damage prevention and system recovery to lifeline system were also discussed in this paper.

Integrating Preventive Maintenance within the Product Life Cycle

complexities associated with software system implemented often makes it imperative to maintain the existing software as a system of high functionality and throughput regime even in the face of changed external environment. It is preferable to enhance the functional operation by upgrading the existing software than changing entire systems as is demonstrated by continued usage of proprietary systems in large banking, insurance, logistic, shipping and airline systems etc. This makes preventive maintenance a very critical tool in the hands of organizations who wish to bring software reliability and maintainability in the future operations of the software systems. Preventive maintenance focuses on the re-engineering of the software rather than its operational maintenance. In this paper we attempt to analyze that preventive maintenance as an inevitable option for the maintenance of the software systems. There is also an attempt to integrate the preventive maintenance into the existing software product life cycle with the focus on the pre and the post deployment phase till the retirement of that software.

An M/M/c queue model for hub covering location problem

The hub location problem appears in a variety of applications including airline systems, cargo delivery systems, and telecommunication network design. Hub location problems deal with finding the location of hub facilities and the allocation of demand nodes to these located hub facilities. We consider a hub-and-spoke network problem with crowdedness or congestion in the system. The transportation time and the rate of arrived trucks to each hub are random variables. In addition, a hub cannot service all trucks simultaneously and it has some restrictions like capacity constraint and the service time limitations. Hubs, which are the most crowded parts of network, are modeled as M/M/c queuing systems. In the application of the proposed model for a cargo transportation system, the number of trucks follows Poisson probability distribution in the queuing system. In this paper at first a nonlinear mathematical programming is presented to find an optimal solution for the considered problem. A probabilistic constraint is included to ensure that the probability of b trucks in a queue is less than a threshold value θ for each hub. Then, we transfer the introduced nonlinear constraints of the mathematical programming model to the linear constraints. Due to the computational complexity of the resulted model, we propose an improved meta-heuristic based on Imperialist Competitive Algorithm and Genetic Algorithm to find near optimal solution of the problem. The performance of the solutions found by the proposed improved meta-heuristic is compared with those of pure GA and those of the mathematical programming model.

A multi-objective imperialist competitive algorithm for a capacitated hub covering location problem

Article history: Received 20 October 2010 Received in revised form 20 December 2010 Accepted 28 December 2010 Available online 28 December 2010 The hub location problem appears in a variety of applications, including airline systems, cargo delivery systems and telecommunication network design. Hub location problems deal with finding the location of hub facilities and the allocation of demand nodes to these located hub facilities. In this paper, a new model for the capacitated single allocation hub covering location problem is presented. Instead of using capacity constraints to limit the amount of flow received by the hubs, the second objective function is introduced to minimize service times in the hubs. The service time in the hubs includes the waiting time of received flows in a queue and the time to get services. Due to the NP-hardness of the problem, a new weight-based multi-objective imperialist competitive algorithm (MOICA) is designed to find near-optimal solutions. To validate the performance of the proposed algorithm, the solutions obtained by the MOICA are compared by the exact solutions of the mathematical programming model. © 2011 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved

Layered and weighted methodology to Workflow evaluation

Software quality improvement for product or service must begin from its root, i.e., Workflow (WF) processes and consequently extend its benefits to knowledge management. However, most research on Workflow Management Systems (WFMS) focus on prediction, tracking and monitoring, not on evaluation of these processes. We propose a weighted layered methodology to assess diverse WF to form best WF practices, consequently enhancing the value of managed knowledge and to enable update, reuse and refinement of codified knowledge in meta-models and reference meta-models, which subsequently can function as implementation roadmaps. Findings from surveys on two airline systems are presented.

A hub covering model for cargo delivery systems

AbstractThe hub location problem appears in a variety of applications including airline systems, cargo delivery systems, and telecommunication network design. When we analyze the application areas separately, we observe that each area has its own characteristics. In this research we focus on cargo delivery systems. Our interviews with various cargo delivery firms operating in Turkey enabled us to determine the constraints, requirements, and criteria of the hub location problem specific to the cargo delivery sector. We present integer programming formulations and large‐scale implementations of the models within Turkey. The results are compared with the current structure of a cargo delivery firm operating in Turkey. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. NETWORKS, Vol. 49(1), 28–39 2007

Simulation optimization for revenue management of airlines with cancellations and overbooking

This paper develops a model-free simulation-based optimization model to solve a seat-allocation problem arising in airlines. The model is designed to accommodate a number of realistic assumptions for real-world airline systems—in particular, allowing cancellations of tickets by passengers and overbooking of planes by carriers. The simulation–optimization model developed here can be used to solve both single-leg problems and multi-leg or network problems. A model-free simulation–optimization approach only requires a discrete-event simulator of the system along with a numerical optimization method such as a gradient-ascent technique or a meta-heuristic. In this sense, it is relatively “easy” because alternative models such as dynamic programming or model-based gradient-ascent usually require more mathematically involved frameworks. Also, existing simulation-based approaches in the literature, unlike the one presented here, fail to capture the dynamics of cancellations and overbooking in their models. Empirical tests conducted with our approach demonstrate that it can produce robust solutions which provide revenue improvements over heuristics used in the industry, namely, EMSR (Expected Marginal Seat Revenue) for single-leg problems and DAVN (Displacement Adjusted Virtual Nesting) for networks.

National Airline Networks : A Graph Theoretic Analysis

Network properties of national domestic airline Systems are examined and linked to causal factors such as levels of economic development, population size and distribution, topographic relief, and size of country. Graph theoretic indices are utilized to measure network characteristics and become the independant variables in regression analyses. The theoretical pitfalls of this method are highlighted by utilizing a path analytic framework to identify the degree of interrelationship among the dependent variables. Still, the graph theoretic method is deemed useful as a means of topologic analysis of network structures.

From the Editor: On Technology: Let’s Make It Simpler and a Little Less Open

It all sounds eerily familiar and much like the scenes unfolding in a horror movie: Whole swaths of the country go dark without electricity… The airline, railroad, and motor traffic systems grind to a halt… Disturbingly enough, these scenes are real. Further, our computers are increasingly incapacitated by viruses, worms, and bugs of various sorts, and the Internet is clogged with spam.