An Approach for Predicting Aggregate Operating Daily Airline Schedules

This paper develops and analyzes a family of models to predict operating daily airline schedules in the continental United States for future years. The study presented is part of an integrated supply-demand framework to study the evolution of the airline industry. The airline schedule is an important service variable that influences other factors of interest such as demand, profit, and load factor. Our approach attempts to predict the daily airline schedule for a given year, given the annual demand and schedule for the previous year, while minimizing the operating costs due to changes in the schedule. The modeling framework is comprised of three distinct sub-parts: a frequency generator to derive the optimal frequency in a market; a mechanism to obtain an integral solution from a fractional solution produced by the frequency generator; and a timetable generator to derive a daily operating schedule from the output of the second step. The model is validated using actual operating frequency information obtai...