Interairline Equity in Airport Scheduling Interventions

In the absence of opportunities for capacity expansion or operational enhancements, air traffic congestion mitigation may require scheduling interventions to control overcapacity scheduling at busy airports. Previous research has shown that large delay reductions could be achieved through comparatively small changes in the schedule of flights. While existing approaches have focused on minimizing the overall impact across the airlines, this paper designs, optimizes, and assesses a novel approach for airport scheduling interventions that incorporates interairline equity objectives. It relies on a multilevel modeling architecture based on on-time performance (i.e., mitigating airport congestion), efficiency (i.e., meeting airline scheduling preferences), and equity (i.e., balancing scheduling adjustments fairly among the airlines) objectives, subject to scheduling and network connectivity constraints. Theoretical results show that, under some scheduling conditions, equity and efficiency can be jointly maximized. Computational results suggest that, under a wide range of current and hypothetical scheduling settings, ignoring interairline equity can lead to highly inequitable outcomes, but that our modeling approach achieves interairline equity at no, or small, losses in efficiency.

The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2017.0817.