ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on capacity planning and operational management for airlines. Travel demand between origin-destination airport pairs drives the development of airline networks. The development of an airline network then drives the selection of aircraft fleets and fleet assignment to flight sectors in a network. Airline scheduling is substantially driven by corporate resource utilisation and profit maximisation. Airline scheduling generally refers to the whole process of generating an airline schedule, including schedule generation, fleet assignment, aircraft routing, crew pairing and crew rostering. The paradigm of airline scheduling, recognising the weakness of current scheduling practice, has gradually shifted to integrated schedule planning and robust scheduling. The areas of airline planning that have seen significant progress in the development of proactive disruption management approaches are aircraft routing and crew scheduling. In airline planning, there is a trade-off between the most efficient use of resources and the susceptibility of the planned solution to schedule disruptions.
