Dissertation Defense - Mehmet Selçuk Korkmaz (PHDIE)

Mehmet Selçuk Korkmaz - Ph.D. Industrial Engineering

Assoc.Prof. Ö. Erhun Kundakcıoğlu– Advisor

Date: 01.06.2021

Time: 16:00

Location: This meeting will be held ONLINE. Please send an e-mail to gizem.bakir@ozyegin.edu.tr in order to participate in this defense.

SOME APPLICATIONS OF MATHEMATICAL OPTIMIZATION IN THE AIRLINE INDUSTRY

Thesis Committee:

Assoc.Prof. Ö. Erhun Kundakcıoğlu, Özyeğin University

Assoc.Prof. Burcu Balçık, Özyeğin University

Asst.Prof. Tuba Yılmaz Gözbaşı, Özyeğin University

Prof. Semra Ağralı, MEF University

Prof. Serol Bulkan, Marmara University

Abstract:

The airline industry has been benefiting from Operations Research techniques for over 50 years. Some major success stories are, in particular, crew scheduling, fleet assignment, operations management, and revenue management. Improvement in both Operations Research methodologies and technology makes it possible to solve large-scale problems. Today, no major airline operates without significant Operations Research support. Due to the size of the industry, even modest measurable improvements can have a considerable impact. In this dissertation, we studied two critical problems among many problems the industry faces. These are revenue management and tail assignment problems.

 Firstly, we suggest a fluid approximation of the underlying stochastic problem considering independent demand from each customer segment and examine different properties that lead to several important insights. Finally, we propose a dynamic look-ahead pricing scheme to compare our approximation results against the well-known EMSR-b heuristic and a dynamic programming solution on randomly generated booking request data.

 Our second chapter considers a new model for the so-called tail assignment problem, which can be expressed by assigning a specific airplane to each fight leg. Our model minimizes multiple costs given an input schedule while satisfying several operational constraints ensuring a feasible tail assignment process. The mathematical model formulation proposed is a mixed-integer program (MIP) with a simplified connection network. We report computational experiments on a series of realistic business cases obtained from Pegasus Airlines.

Bio: 

Selçuk Korkmaz received his B.S. degree in Computer Science from Boğaziçi University and M.Sc degree in Engineering Management from Marmara University. He has taught courses on Revenue Management in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Ozyeğin University. His research interests include pricing, scheduling, and assignment problems in service operations management.