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A graph-theoretic method to quantify the airline route authority

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Abstract

A U.S. certificated passenger airline must be authorized by the Civil Aeronautics Board before it can schedule a route to serve a set of cities. The route authority is described in a number of legal statements on a Route Certificate, which specifies the routing restrictions by which the airline must abide in offering the service. For cost considerations, an airline is often interested in the shortest flight-time routes between city pairs. This paper introduces a graph-theoretic method to quantify the legal statements in a Certificate. Through straightforward matrix operations, all the authorized nonstop and multistop routes, including the shortest time routes, can be generated. The method is a convenient tool to help an airline to generate alternative network routes as demonstrated by a case study of American Airlines.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil Engineering and The Pennsylvania Transportation Institute, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

    Yupo Chan

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  1. Yupo Chan
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Chan, Y. A graph-theoretic method to quantify the airline route authority. Transportation 8, 275–291 (1979). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00169992

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00169992

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