Inter-airline Equity in Airport Scheduling Interventions

Abstract

In the absence of opportunities for capacity expansion or operational enhancements, air traffic congestion mitigation may require scheduling interventions aimed to control the extent of overcapacity scheduling at busy airports. Previous research has shown that large delay reductions could be achieved through comparatively small changes in the schedule of flights. While existing approaches have focused on minimizing the overall impact of scheduling interventions across the airlines, this paper designs, optimizes, and assesses a novel approach for airport scheduling interventions that incorporates inter-airline equity objectives. It relies on a lexicographic modeling architecture based on efficiency (i.e., meeting airline scheduling preferences), equity (i.e., balancing scheduling adjustments fairly among the airlines), and on-time performance (i.e., mitigating airport congestion) objectives, subject to scheduling and network connectivity constraints. Theoretical results show that, under some scheduling conditions, equity and efficiency can be jointly maximized. Computational results suggest that, under a wide range of current and hypothetical scheduling settings, ignoring inter-airline equity can lead to highly inequitable outcomes, but that our modeling approach achieves inter-airline equity at no, or small, losses in efficiency. Keywords: airport demand management, inter-airline equity, efficiency-equity trade-off, integer programming, dynamic programming, queuing model