Research Of Designing Airport Hub-and-Spoke Network

Domestic demand of air transportation keeps increasing at high speed with the constraint of laggard transportation network. Currently, our air transportation network is mainly point-to-point, which needs routes between two random airports. However, implementing direct transportation between small cities would lead to the waste of resources due to small traffic, which results in higher transportation costs, taking no advantage of economy of scale. It is important to change our air transportation network, constructing more competitive network.Hub-and-Spoke network shows advantages gradually currently. Transferring cargoes at hub cities can not only make full use of economy of scale, and also can reduce the amount of routes so that limited capacity can be used on main routes, increasing the flight frequency and taking advantage of economy of density. This is why hub-spoke network can be use as an important reference of domestic air transportation network construction. Besides, the abdominal compartment of passenger airplane can be used for cargoes because the amount of packages need to be carried is small, which makes abdominal compartment an important capacity for cargoes.Under such circumstances, this thesis introduced the general situation of airline transportation and then studied the characteristics of airport hub-spoke network. On the basis of these introductions combining with the characteristics of air transportation, it studied air express, constructing a combined integer linear programming model for air transportation network. The subject of this model is to minimize transportation cost to construct hub-spoke air network considering combined usage of passenger plane bellyhold and cargo plane. The case study chose main cities of SF air express network and used LINGO to solve the model. The model is proved reasonable and worth referring to our domestic air transportation network through the result analysis.