Skedu - the DEA Airline Comparator
Airline Scheduling Optimization
The project objective was to develop an application for ranking the productivity of airlines and their itineraries for the schedule design problem. The application is developed based on DEA (Data envelopment analysis) and takes into account airline business profits, airline competitors and passenger travel convenience as parameters in the model. The schedule design problem involves determining when and where to offer flights so that profits are maximized.
Research Details
Three main parts of work were done in the 5-month internship:
Big data analysis
It consists in filtering and integrating different sets of Amadeus airline data source. After, a matching algorithm was implemented to integrate them and calculate the parameters which would be used later on in the optimization model.DEA Linear Programming model implementation
The DEA Linear Programming model was defined and implemented via Python. A few Linear Programming tools were used to solve the problem and speed up the optimization process. Once we calculated all the itineraries DEA scores, we began the airline itineraries ranking.Application Skedu’s design and integration
Skedu owns two user interfaces: a global airline traffic view and an airport view, each corresponding with 3 airline or itineraries ranking.
Global Airlines Ranking
We will be able to rank airline O&Ds by the DEA scores we estimated under DEA linear Programming model. Besides, in order to rank the airlines, we just need calculate the average score of all the O&Ds related to each airline. Figure 1 shows us an example as the ranking result of the model. As you can see in this figure, once an objective airline (for instance Air France) is focused, Skedu will be able to display the global airlines ranking with the position of the objective airline within 0.3 second.
Global O&Ds’ Productivity Ranking
Skedu can also help us to take a look at the global O&Ds’ productivity ranking. In Figure 2, we rank all the O&Ds of Air France (AF) respectively to the O&Ds it operates or shares with other airline, or the O&Ds it does not run yet but their business competitors have.
We can see that
Firstly
, there could be multiple best 1-leg O&Ds for AF, such as: Brest Bretagne BES - Paris CDG as well as Birmingham BHX - Paris CDG;Secondly
, The productivity for 2-leg O&Ds is normally less than a half of best 1-leg O&Ds;Thirdly
, AF doesn’t have the O&D Liverpool John Lennon airport - Belfast International Airport while it provides the airline EastJet (U2) good profits.