A study on flight combination in terms of timed stochastic-flow network

The highly competitive airline market speeds up the needs in airline alliance or flight combination to cost down the operation as well as to enlarge the market share. However, the low reliability in some flight combinations may discourage the customer to buy such products. The low reliability of flight combination means that the connection of flights in some situation becomes impossible, and may cause a customer loss. This paper proposes a method to evaluate the reliability of flight combination in terms of timed stochastic-flow network. A stochastic-flow network (SFN) is a network whose flow has stochastic behavior or probabilistic multi-states. A timed stochastic-flow network (TSFN) is a SFN whose flow spends time to go through the network. Through this new model some undiscovered flight combinations are found out, and some unreliable flight combinations can be inspected. A numerical example is presented for the explanation of the proposed method.