EURO 2025 Leeds
Abstract Submission

2263. Optimizing Airport Selection for Electric Aircraft Operations

Invited abstract in session TC-57: Air transportation I, stream Transportation.

Tuesday, 12:30-14:00
Room: Liberty 1.12

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Imke Joormann
TU Braunschweig
2. Frederic Kroner
TU Braunschweig
3. Andreas M. Tillmann
Institute for Mathematics, TU Clausthal

Abstract

With ambitious emission reduction targets set by the international community and individual states, the development of electric aircraft will be further pursued in the upcoming years. However, the operation of electric aircraft requires substantial airport infrastructure investments, making a strategic selection crucial. Given the high costs of airport expansions and range limitations of electric aircraft, an optimized global approach ensures that selected airports minimize overall emissions within a fixed investment budget. The passenger demand between airport pairs are modeled as a multi-commodity flow. Additionally, to account for airlines’ motivation to minimize operating costs, we extend our approach to a two-stage optimization problem.
At the first level, the leader determines the selection of airports for electrification, focusing on minimizing total emissions. At the second level, airlines route passengers based on the chosen electrification to reduce their operational costs. To solve this model efficiently, we can reformulate the bilevel formulation as a Mixed-Integer Program (MIP). We then apply a path-based formulation within a column generation framework to identify the most beneficial flight routes based on electrification status.
We have gathered real-world data, which are utilized to analyze the model with regards to solvability in relation to the instance size and the established emission limits.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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