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 robust fleet assignment model addressed in this paper utilizes 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 utilized to reduce the computation involved in solving the problem. A Latin hypercube-based design is developed within the feasible region, and regression splines are employed to obtain the approximation for the secondstage recourse function. The results on the accuracy of the fit for a real airline carrier are presented and future work is discussed.