An explanatory approach to modeling the fleet assignment in the global air transportation system

Airlines’ fleet assignment heavily affects the economic and ecological performance of the global air transportation system (ATS). Consequently, it is inevitable to include potential changes of the fleet assignment when modeling and assessing future global ATS scenarios. Therefore, this article presents a novel explanatory approach to modeling the fleet assignment in the global ATS. The presented approach is based on formulating and solving an optimization problem, which describes the fleet assignment in the ATS through a suitable combination of objective function and constraints. While the objective function combines both the airline and the passenger perspective on the fleet assignment, the constraints include additional operational and technological aspects. In comparison to the available global fleet assignment models in the literature, which rely on statistical approaches, the advantages of the presented approach via an optimization problem lie in the overall scenario capability and the consideration of explicit aircraft types instead of simplifying seat categories. To calibrate and validate our model, we use 10 years of historic flight schedule data. The results underline the strengths and weaknesses of the presented approach and indicate potential for future improvement.