CHARACTERISING THE ROLE OF FLEET RENEWAL ON THE PATHWAY TO 2050: A EUROPEAN AIRLINE CASE STUDY

Abstract

This work developed a simulation tool that incorporates both airline operations and aircraft specific capabilities when investigating the environmental and economic sustainability pathways for short haul aviation. A network of airports, centred around the island of Ireland and its connectivity to Europe, was created using the mathematics of multi-commodity flow networks and solved using mixed-integer linear programming. The model schedules a given fleet of aircraft to flights in the network such that passenger demand is met in the most environmentally and economically sustainable way. Three fleet composition cases are studied to investigate the impact fleet renewal has on the sustainability of an airline. The three cases vary the composition of the fleet with 0%, 25% and 50% of the fleet population being the advanced B737-8200 aircraft with the balance of the population being the current generation B737-800 variant. The scheduling model is capable of completely scheduling an airline’s fleet as well as generating solutions that are influenced by the performance of the aircraft comprising the fleet. This important functionality within the model ensures that the solution offered by the optimisation algorithm is intrinsically linked to and dependent upon both the airline’s operational attributes and the specific aircraft parameters. This core functionality enables the completion of these case studies investigating the sustainability of current generation and next generation aircraft technology implementation. Airline sustainability was analysed to determine the business case and environmental benefits of substituting B737-8200 aircraft in place of B737-800’s for the real world operations of a European airline, to characterise the role of technology improvements on a fleet-wide basis and to help inform and provide insight into the role of fleet renewal on the route to net-zero.