Flight Scheduling with Aircraft Sharing - Initial Findings

Aligning with the objectives of the Paris Agreement, airlines are committed to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. In order to help achieve this goal, this paper addresses the creation of flight schedules across airlines under the premise that airlines share their aircraft fleets and that passenger flows are bundled across airlines. We propose a mixed-integer linear programming model to determine the departure times of all flights within a given network, considering desired frequencies by airport pairs and aircraft types in the network. The objective is to minimize the number of aircraft needed to perform the schedule. As the model is hard to solve for flight networks of realistic size, we discuss heuristic approaches and investigate their performance using synthetically generated instances. We solve the model for scenarios with and without aircraft sharing, in order to estimate the maximum potential of aircraft sharing and passenger bundling.