Exploring Energy Efficiency and Service Quality of Airlines with Cruise Speed Control

In the past decade, fuel consumption and CO2 emission have increased in the airline industry. Large CO2 footprint has a damaging effect on the environment. Global concerns over this issue have made the airline industry to be greener. Most efforts of the green airline industry are improving the fuel consumption to reduce the CO2 emission and its environmental damage. Here, we use cruise speed control to control the fuel consumption and CO2 emission. Each aircraft has a different speed level needing a different fuel consumption. Service quality is studied besides the energy consumption. We investigate two objectives including total energy consumption (TEC) and passenger service level (PSL). TEC and PSL are conflicting in nature. We develop a mixed-integer nonlinear programming model to integrate schedule design, aircraft assignment and maintenance routing problems. We make use of the augmented ε-constraint method to solve the problem. To evaluate the model, a real data based on the Emirates airline flights is used. The results are compared using four different scenarios.