Airline Network Planning Considering Climate Impact: Assessing New Operational Improvements

Airline Network Planning Considering Climate Impact: Assessing New Operational Improvements

Noorafza, M. (TU Delft Air Transport & Operations)
Santos, Bruno F. (TU Delft Air Transport & Operations)
Sharpanskykh, Alexei (TU Delft Air Transport & Operations)
Zengerling, Zarah L. (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V. (DLR))
Weder, Christian M. (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V. (DLR))
Linke, Florian (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V. (DLR))
Grewe, V. (TU Delft Aircraft Noise and Climate Effects; Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V. (DLR))

2023

The aviation industry has set an ambitious goal of reducing its climate impacts. Accordingly, airlines must balance their plans according to this goal with financial considerations. We developed a multi-objective framework to facilitate climate-aware network design by incorporating the objective to minimise the flight average temperature response (ATR) when optimising the airline network. We also assessed the operational improvements (OIs) which are introduced to improve sustainability in airline operations. In particular, we considered intermediate stop-overs (ISOs) and lower flight altitudes as OIs in our case studies. We analysed the impact of considering the climate impact in the planning of operations of three different airline types: one main-hub-and-spoke (KLM), one smaller multi-hub airline (TAP), and one low-cost carrier (EasyJet). The results show that airlines could also lower their environmental impact by 10–36% when considering the ATR as an objective. However, this would require an 8–20% reduction in profits. Adopting lower-altitude flying with ISO could mitigate their climate impact by 27–49% while reducing profits by approximately 6%. Our study highlights the importance of considering the airline network as a whole and demonstrates the potential benefits of operational improvements from a network perspective.

network planning
climate impact
non-CO2 effects
intermediate stop-over
average temperature response
multi-agent systems
dynamic programming

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:60c53ecd-c9e6-428a-8b1e-a2f76a2a8a9d

10.3390/ app13116722

2076-3417

Applied Sciences, 13 (11)

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2023 M. Noorafza, Bruno F. Santos, Alexei Sharpanskykh, Zarah L. Zengerling, Christian M. Weder, Florian Linke, V. Grewe