Evaluating the Feasibility of Reliever and Floating Hub Concepts when a Primary Airline Hub Experiences Excessive Delays
Evert Meyer, Colin Rice, Patrick Jaillet, and Michael McNerney, University of Texas at Austin, September, 1997, 120 pp. (467503-1)
This study intends to evaluate strategies to reassign and optimize airport and airline schedules when experiencing a disruptive disturbance at a major hub airport and still maintain a reasonable service. One such option is to temporarily use a nearby airport to act as a connecting hub, which can help reduce delays caused by a major hub’s closure. This airport would be known as a reliever or alternate hub. Another option would be over-flying of the hub and swapping larger aircraft onto other routings throughout the system enabling passengers to connect through alternative hubs. Such a scheme is referred to as a “floating hub” concept.
A network-flow approach is used for the schedule allocation and to quantify the costs of the various operating strategies. Operating decisions such as flight cancellation and aircraft rotation options are optimized using a Generic Algorithm approach. Costs for potential weather delays, additional fuel consumption, infrastructure investment and passenger-delay costs are then compared for all scenarios to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed strategies.
Keywords: Triple Reliever Hubs, Dual Reliever Hubs, Single Reliever Hubs, Airport, Airport Capacity, Reliever Hub, Floating Hub
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Reference Report #467503-1