A flight scheduling model for Taiwan airlines under market competitions

In this research, we develop a short-term flight scheduling model with variable market shares in order to help a Taiwan airline to solve for better fleet routes and flight schedules in today's competitive markets. The model is formulated as a nonlinear mixed integer program, characterized as an NP-hard problem, which is more difficult to solve than the traditional fixed market share flight scheduling problems, often formulated as integer/mixed integer linear programs. We develop a heuristic method to efficiently solve the model. The test results, mainly using the data from a major Taiwan airline's operations, show the good performance of the model and the solution algorithm.