Research On The Construction Of The Hub-and-Spoke Cargo Airline Network

The airline network is a prerequisite for airline’s operation. A scientific and reasonable network is very essential to improve airline’s benefits. As a key way to promote airline’s competitiveness, a scientific and reasonable network has a vital significance for the long-term development of every airline. Based on the analysis of the advantages and feasibility of hub-and-spoke network, the thesis used the knowledges of transport economics, decision analysis and network optimization to construct the hub-and-spoke airline network. It contained three main parts:choice of the hub airports, construction of the airline network and determination of the aircraft type and the frequency of flights.In the selection of hub airports, the thesis used the method of decision-making based on multi-attribute and AHP to build index system, which was used to calculate the synthesized value of airports to evaluate every airport, and then chose the hub airports. Based on the selection of the hub airports, the thesis built a mixed integer linear model to construct the hub-and-spoke network. Based on the actual airline operational data, the thesis analyzed two types of the cargo airline network:three hubs and four hubs. On the basis, considering the evaluation results and the addresses of airports, the thesis analyzed different combinations of hubs to get the optimal one and the specific routes of the non-hubs to hubs. The thesis regarded the maximum payload of different aircrafts, the normal cruising Speed, fuel consumption and landing fee as the control variables and the minimum airline total operation costs as the objective function to build a model which was used to determine the aircraft type and the frequency of flights. And the model was solved by LINGO.