| Summary |
Chin-Chang Liang,2007.02
Department of Transportation Technology and Management National Chiao Tung University
With the fuel price soaring in the past years, it not only increases airlines’ expenditure of fuel, but also aggravates the operation condition of airline industry. Therefore, how to ease airlines’ financial difficulty by fuel-saving has become an import issue. In addition, most past studies about departure flight delay has proved the application of ground holding policy, but seldom concerned the assignment policy of departure flights in congestion airport according to the fuel consumption of aircrafts. The congestion situation and the operational status of aircrafts waiting at terminal apron and holding pad are similar as the block queue of cars waiting for service in the slow moving system by Dougherty (1997). Therefore this study aims to combine block queue concept and fuel-saving concept to formulate models on analyzing assignment policy for departure flights of the congested airport.
The aims of this study are to develop an aircraft assignment model based on the concept of block-queuing proposed by Dougherty (1997), so as to minimize departure flights’ fuel cost in a congestion airport, and compare the difference of delay cost between block-queuing assignment and consecutive assignment. The study derives the time of each departure flight from apron to holding pad based on Air Traffic Control Rule assigning departure flights consecutively, and calculates the fuel cost of each flight due to taxing and waiting for departure. The study then explores the block-queuing conditions of departure flights according to the connective relations of flights’ departure time to construct a block-queuing assignment model with considerations of various situations and decide whether a departure flight should wait at terminal apron or holding pad. Furthermore, the study formulates delay cost functions with respect to passengers, airline and airport operators.
The study collects data about the schedule of departure/arrival flights and the delay of departure flights in C.K.S International Airport to demonstrate the application of the model. The results show that block-queuing assignment method significantly reduces more fuel cost as compared with consecutive assignment method. It may increase the fuel-saving efficiency, while reduce airport operators’ cost due to an idle runway and passengers’ cost caused by delay in the congestion airport. Furthermore, the fuel price is shown to have significantly impacts on the assignment policy. |
