Coupled hybrid electric aircraft design and strategic airline planning

With the aviation sector growing each year, the need for a reduced climate impact is becoming increasingly important. Electrification of the propulsion system is believed to offer promising avenues in achieving this reduction. Additionally, airlines operating these aircraft have to adapt their operations and network to optimally utilize these...

Potential Impact of Operational Towing on Aircraft Emissions

In this paper, the emissions mitigation potential of implementing operational towing at major European airports is evaluated. Using mixed-integer linear programming, a scenario simulating mixed taxiing operations is used to find the relationship between fixed vehicle costs and target emission savings at an airport and European level. Using...

Life Cycle Assessment of Inflight Services and Measures to Reduce Their Carbon Footprint

Aviation is an important sector and one of the key contributors to today’s economy. With a forecasted annual growth rate of 4.4%, the sector is expected to expand even more in the coming years. This expansion is however followed by the environmental burdens aviation causes to the environment. Following the anticipated growth of the aviation...

Airport Market Share Forecasting in Multi Airport Regions

Urbanization is a worldwide trend that drives an immense increase in air traffic demand. The worldwide aviation network makes global business possible which generates economic growth, creates jobs and facilitates international tourism and trade. Many of the world's transport hubs like The Greater London Area have allocated this demand over...

An applied uncertainty analysis on the techno-economic valuation of engine wash procedures

Overall economic assessments (OEAs) can provide a sound basis for decision-making in the areas of investments in new technologies and the application of existent technologies or operating practices. However, due to their long time horizons and complex nature, OEAs often contain many uncertain inputs, making a deterministic simulation...

Assessing the Impact Damage Risk on Composite Structures: A method of predicting impact damage risk on composite aircraft fuselage by combining probability of detection and a decision risk matrix

Impact on composite structures shows a different damage behaviour compared to metal structures. Due to the current short operational life time of composite aircraft the risks of impact damages on composite structures are unknown. This paper proposes a new method for quantitative risk analysis of low velocity impact damages on composite aircraft...

A Framework for Adopting Drones to a Logistics Cargo Operator Network

City logistics concern solutions in package movements that face challenges in rapid growth in demand for home deliveries, congestion, and expectations from consumers for sustainable solutions. Providing last mile delivery services with drones is considered a promising solution in literature as a response to the raising challenges in urban areas....

Adaptations for CNN-LSTM Network for Remaining Useful Life Prediction: Adaptable Time Window and Sub-Network Training

Estimating the RUL (Remaining Useful Life) of machinery is a useful tool for maintenance and performance operations. This results in lower costs, improved safety and operational improvements.<br/>This paper proposes two adaptations to the CNN-LSTM network provided by Li et al. \cite{Li2019APrediction}, as well as exploring reproducibility,...

Assessing the Impact of Condition-Based Maintenance as a Function of the Variation in Prognostics Performance Levels

As the profit margins of the airline industry are relatively low, it is of utmost importance to keep costs low in order for airlines to stay competitive. An important cost factor is maintenance costs, as it can take up around 10-20 % of the total direct operational costs. Currently, much development is taking place in developing condition-based...

Long-term C-check scheduling for a fleet of heterogeneous aircraft under uncertainty

The MRO market currently spans around 9.5% of the total operating cost of an airline. Of this, 70% is covered by heavy-maintenance. Reduction of these costs and improving efficiency could, therefore, be significant for an airline. A possible solution is the optimization of the long-term schedule of heavy-maintenance checks. Current approaches...

Modelling Maintenance: Cost Optimised Maintenance in Shipping

The current operational cost estimate applied by shipping management companies is insufficiently valid and accurate for determining the operational budget. Most shipping management companies include scheduled maintenance jobs in the operational cost calculation. Scheduled maintenance does not take unforeseen maintenance into account. In...

An Aircraft and Schedule Integrated Approach to Improve Cockpit Crew Pairings

For airlines, crew costs make up the second largest expense, behind fuel costs. Because these costs are very high, there is a large potential gain in improving the crew efficiency within the bounds set by the law and collective labor agreements. This thesis investigates the dated crew pairing problem, and how the crew pairing problem can be...

Reliability modelling for Aircraft Component Availability Management

Global and local aviation traffic is growing while economic and performance pressures on the industry are increasing. As a consequence, airlines try to maximise their fleet utilization. Airline operators and Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) providers therefore require as much insight as possible in factors affecting component reliability...

Global Air Cargo Flows Estimation Based on OD Trade Data

Where a relatively small part (less than 1%) by volume of world trade is represented by air transport, the orientation towards high value products results in a share of almost 35% of international trade in value. But where data of the amount of trade between countries is highly available, the actual routing of those traded goods is not known at...

Determination of headways and vehicle capacities in public transport networks using a dynamic assignment model

The thesis project deals with the tactical determination of supply provision in terms of line frequencies and deployed vehicle capacities in public transport networks using a dynamic assignment model. To this end, an agent-based dynamic and stochastic simulation model for public transport operations, that can consider service reliability issues,...