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The availability of numerous types of aircraft and their technical capabilities are offering a wide range of alternatives. As customers have different expectations, aircraft type selection is a business strategy for the airline companies. The choice on carriers should be made in accordance with disparate dimensions such as customers' expectations, profit of the company, capacity limitations and market conditions. This study formulates aircraft type selection as a Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problem and proposes a novel model that incorporates fuzzy trigonometric norms to solve. Being differentiated from the existing models in the literature, a two-stage model is identified. In the 1st stage, a fuzzy trigonometric-based Ordinal Priority Approach (OPA) determines the criteria weights. In the 2nd stage, RAFSI (Ranking of Alternatives through Functional Mapping of Criteria Subintervals into Single Intervals) is integrated to determine the optimal aircraft type. The model simulated for a case of Turkish Airline company. Sensitivity tests justify robustness of the model. Results show that among the four options, medium-scale high-qualified but not luxury aircraft is the best option.
Deveci et al. (Wed,) studied this question.