Research On Robust Optimization Design Problems Of Hub-and-Spoke Airline Network

The airline network is the foundation of the airline company, and the important means of the airline company which try for development is to design the airline netwok by scientific method. Other works of the airline company such as flight schedule, operation control, revenue management are based on the airline network. Whether the airline network is reasonable or not has far-reaching effect on the benefit of the airline company. The hub-and-spoke airline network can achieve economies of scale. This network has attracted more and more attention when the scale of air transportation is expansion. The previous research on the hub-and-spoke airline network design was for the certain scenario. But in practice the demand and cost of air transportation are uncertain. So this article studies the hub-and-spoke airline network robust optimization design for the uncertain scenario.Through the quantificational comparison on the point-to-point and the strict and the nonstrict hub-and-spoke airline networks, we obtain the connection of the airline network configuration and the scale of the market. The hub-and-spoke airline network can exert its predominance when the air transportation reaches some scale. The characteristic of the hub-and-spoke airline network is confirmed. The transfer transportation mode ought to be substituted by the nonstop transportation mode when the included angle of the two airlines in the transfer transportation mode is smaller than a specific value. The benefit of the airline company can increase.This article studies the problem of the hub airport selection by robust deviation optimization. We propose new algorithm to solve the problem. The complexity of the existing algorithm is reduced from min. In the case of the demand and cost with the uncertainty, this article establishes several robust optimization models of the hub-and-spoke airline network. The distribution of probability is unknown. First of all we establish the hub airport selection models of the strict and nonstrict hub-and-spoke airline networks. Then taking into account the cost of opening airline, we establish the airline selection model of the strict hub-and-spoke airline network when hub airports have been selected in advance. In the end based on selecting hub arc, the hub arc selection model of the strict hub-and-spoke airline network is established.This article proposes the algorithms to solve the models which have been established before. When the number of hub airports is small, the algorithm which can solve the certain model is improved to solve S-HS-R-C p -Hub and NS-HS-R-C p -Hub. The improved algorithm is based on the shortest path algorithm. When the number of hub airports is large, the algorithm is proposed to solve S-HS-R-C p -Hub and the algorithm is based on the tabu search algorithm. We improve the Benders decomposition algorithm to solve S-HS-R-C p -Airline. We improve the enumeration algorithm to solve S-HS-R-C q -Hub-Arc. The enumeration algorithm can solve the certain model which is based on selecting hub arc. We separately use the models which have been established before to construct the hub-and-spoke airline network on fifteen cities of China. These instances validate the algorithms which are proposed to solve the robust optimization models.