Evaluation of pairing requests in dynamic airline crew rostering

In operational airline crew scheduling, one of the major tasks is to allocate flight activities to individual crew members. This task is referred to as the crew rostering problem; an optimization problem that aims to assign flights to crew members in a cost-effective way, while also considering preferences of crewmembers. Flights are combined...

Modelling and Optimization of Tilt-Rotor Aircraft Flight Trajectories

Tilt-rotor aircraft combine the helicopter’s benefit of VTOL capability and the flight performance that turboprops possess on range, speed and endurance. Tilt-rotor aircraft have the potential to decrease airport congestion and average flight delay in passenger transportation, while benefits are numerous in i.e. search and rescue, disaster...

Machine Learning for Predictive Maintenance: A Boeing 747 Bleed Air Valves case study

The newest generation of aircraft has seen a strong increase in sensor data generated on-board. The available data has the potential to indicate the health state of individual components based on which their maintenance requirements can be determined, a maintenance strategy called Condition Based Maintenance. Predictive Maintenance is a specific...

Quantifying Vulnerabilities in an Airport Checkpoint: A study on the role of employee behavior in the emergence of vulnerabilities

Ever since the attacks on the World Trade Center, airport security has been a topic of interest. The United States was caught by surprise and the attacks triggered a renewed interest in aviation security. It was well recognized that airport security was one step behind on intelligent attackers and this created the need to developed better risk...

Towards Formalization and Operationalization of Resilience: A study on anticipation in the context of airport security operations

Resilience can be understood as the intrinsic ability of a system to adapt its functioning prior to, during, or following changes and disturbances, so that it can sustain required operations and performance under both expected and unexpected conditions. The need to explore the concept of resilience, in the context of socio-technical systems, is...

Modelling and analysis of dynamic relations and trade-offs between security and efficiency in airport security operations

The two performance areas “security” and “efficiency” in airport security operations cannot be analyzed apart from each other, since influencing one has a large impact on the other. In this research agent-based modelling is used to analyze dynamic relations and trade-offs between security and efficiency within airport security operations....

Airline Simulation Model - Modeling Competition and Passenger Choice

In this thesis, a contribution has been made to the development of a simulation framework which is capable of realistically simulating market dynamics with respect to competition and passenger choice in the European aviation market. In total, 22 routes have been included into the simulation framework, with airports including those in Amsterdam,...

Multi-period adaptive fleet planning problem: with Approximate Dynamic Programming

This MSc thesis presents a stochastic modelling approach to the multi-period airline fleet planning problem. Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) is used to model the impact of demand uncertainty on fleet decisions. The proposed ADP algorithm applies local value function approximations resulting from Gaussian kernel regressions to estimate...

A Many-objective Tactical Stand Allocation: Stakeholder Trade-offs and Performance Planning: A London Heathrow Airport Case Study

Airports are highly complex systems that can generate economic growth<br/>on their own. Accordingly, airports should take proactive actions to<br/>create a status quo between the stakeholders(the airport itself,<br/>airlines, passengers) in the tactical planning of the aircraft stand<br/>allocation. Namely, the harmonization between the...

Development of an aircraft maintenance schedule optimisation method focused on the minimisation of workload fluctuations

In aircraft maintenance, the initial maintenance schedule of an aircraft is highly dependent on the maintenance planning document. This document, set up by manufacturers, regulators and operators, contains all the requirements for the initial maintenance schedule of a specific aircraft. It serves as a reference for the development of an...