A statistical computer experiments approach to airline fleet assignment

The fleet assignment model allocates a fleet of aircraft to scheduled flight legs in an airline timetable. The fleet assignment model addressed in this paper uses a two-stage stochastic programming framework along with the Boeing concept of demand driven dispatch to assign crew compatible aircraft in the first stage, so as to enhance the demand capturing potential of swapping in the second stage. A design and analysis of computer experiments approach is used to reduce the computation involved in solving the problem. The main contribution of this paper is a method to obtain an approximation for the expected profit function using a regression splines fit, generated over a Latin hypercube design. The results on the accuracy of the fit for a real airline carrier are presented and future work is discussed.