Article 4: Budget Airline Operations Optimization Using Linear Programming

Literature review

Budget Airline is a low budget airline company that provides cheaper flight fares but it has a very
limited service. Since the expenses mainly comes from the maintenance of the airlines, hence
comfort are lesser without affecting the safety of the passengers while keeping the flight tickets
cheap.

The main cost for airlines would be the fuel consumed by airlines when planes travel from
one destination to another. In order to reduce this cost, smaller planes are used because they
consume less oil compared to the bigger ones unless required. Hence, it is proper that a company
keep in watch of the fuel being used by the airplanes and proper scheduling and utilizing the
schedule and travel destination based on its fuel consumption.

In this case,fuel is a major problem for budget airlines, so airlines have to use Fuel Hedging
method which is one of the linear programming method where the company needs to make
prediction of the future fuel price by purchasing the current fuel rate through contracts and making
a secure of the oil trade contract.

Optimization Model
Table 4: Profit earned by the company based on the cities
Analysis

Since the optimization model is complex, Big M and Simplex Method are not used.
Instead,analysis is done using Lindo Programming is as shown below:

Table 5: Solution after Optimization for the Slot Utilization

Conclusion

From the result, based on the availability of the slots that are fully utilized in various
airports where the optimized result is based on ,the company can earn $60,000 every day which
would has stacked up a $21 Miliion revenue every year.The company can use this method for staff
scheduling in terms of logistics of the company so that cost are kept in bare minimum and having the
right amount of workers needed.
Reference

1) Pankil Patel and Dr. Ahad AliA. Leon Linton Department of Mechanical
EngineeringLawrence Technological UniversitySouthfield, MI 48075, USA (2018 ) ‘Budget
Airline Operations Optimization using Linear Programming’ . website:
http://ieomsociety.org/ieom2018/papers/719.pdf