A dynamic booking policy for multiple fare classes that share the same seating pool on one leg of an airline flight, when seats are booked in a nested fashion and when lower fare classes book before higher ones, is determined. The dynamic policy of airline booking makes repetitive use of an optimal static policy over the booking period, based on the most recent demand and capacity information. ...

Crew scheduling can be defined as the problem of assigning a group of workers (a crew) to a set of tasks. The crews are typically interchangeable , although in some cases different crews possess different characteristics that affect which subsets of tasks they can complete. Crew scheduling problems appear in a number of transportation contexts. Examples include bus and rail transit, truck and r...

Passenger behavior is the fundamental factor driving air transportation market reactions to the managerial decisions of airlines; therefore, it is important to understand passenger path choice process, and to develop a valid model to represent it. In this thesis, passenger disutilities are used to indicate passengers' sensitivity to alternative path options. Accordingly, passenger disutilities ...

The adaptive critic heuristic has been a popular algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL) and approximate dynamic programming (ADP) alike. It is one of the first RL and ADP algorithms. RL and ADP algorithms are particularly useful for solving Markov decision processes (MDPs) that suffer from the curses of dimensionality and modeling. Many real-world problems however tend to be semi-Markov decis...

Purpose The emergence of new media has changed the way how airlines interact with the public. This study analyzes how airlines use one of the most popular new media platforms, Facebook, to manage public relations, communicate with customers and diversify their sales channels. This topic has not been covered by scientific literature so far. Methods This paper uses content analysis to identify ty...

Since the 1950s, the operations research community has developed a large number of computer models to aid in the solution of airline scheduling problems. One notable characteristic of these contributions is that each algorithm was developed with its own input and output structures, user interface, and hardware and software requirements. The result is that many of these contributions are under-u...

Airline schedule development continues to remain one of the most challenging planning activity for any airline. An airline schedule comprises of a list of flights and specifies the origin, destination, scheduled departure, and arrival time of each flight in the airline’s network. A critical component of the schedule development activity is the choice of flight block-times, which depend on sever...

Publications in the working paper series are issued for discussion and are not considered final reports. Comments are invited. In flight scheduling, airlines usually determine optimal timing for their flights to respond to time-dependent demand and the requirement of frequency plans, of available fleets and of aircraft routings. Nevertheless, it is unavoidable that some flights cannot actually ...

A well-studied problem in the literature on airline revenue (or yield) management is the optimal allocation of seat inventory among fare classes given a demand distribution for each class. In practice, the seat allocation decisions of one airline affect the passenger demands for seats on other airlines. In this paper we examine the seat inventory control problem under both horizontal competitio...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effectiveness of airline pilot training for abnormal in-flight events. BACKGROUND Numerous accident reports describe situations in which pilots responded to abnormal events in ways that were different from what they had practiced many times before. One explanation for these missteps is that training and testing for these skills have become a highly predictable routin...