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Challenge Team Abstract
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Team Number: 27 School Name: Albuquerque Academy Area of Science: Operations Research Project Title: Profit Maximization Through Flight Scheduling |
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Our project will determine what flights an airline should schedule in order to maximize profits given a set of passengers with fixed travel plans. We will address the difficulty of scheduling flights to transport all the passengers without wasting time or fuel. By considering payroll of the flight and landing crews, capacity and fuel efficiency of the airplanes, number of passengers, landing fees, fuel efficiency, and other relevant information, we will simulate a hypothetical airline. The problem is important because, in such an expansive country and with so many people travelling, an airline can easily squander millions of dollars with a badly thought-out system for planning flights.
The purpose of our project is to help airlines schedule flights more effectively. Our results should generate an optimum schedule of flights to maximize efficiency and therefore profits. Beginning by requesting data from the Federal Aviation Association, Department of Transportation, existing airlines, and airplane manufacturing companies, we will try to apply methods used for similar graph optimization problems such as the travelling salesman. Due the fierce competition of the now deregulated airline industry, we realize that it may be difficult to obtain recent figures that would reveal the comparative efficiency of airlines. If this is a major obstacle, we may use older statistics with slight alterations for technological advancements and population increases if those numbers are more readily available. By using several techniques including complete search, local optimization, and genetic algorithms, we will determine which method is the most effective in terms of generating profit.
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