Integrated Strategic and Operational Model of a National Aviation System to Support Sectoral Decarbonization

Abstract

Decarbonization poses a distinct technical and economic challenge to the aviation industry. Meeting those challenges while improving system reliability, efficiency, and access may require novel network structures, operational concepts, and interactions with the energy sector, which are difficult to anticipate without macro-scale system modeling. This thesis develops an integrated strategic and operational formulation for modeling a national aviation system, with the goal of co-optimizing capital and infrastructure investments, flight scheduling, and passenger and aircraft routing. The formulation is proposed, validated, and tested for performance. It is found that, while the model is valid and shows promise for system planning, performance improvements must be made before it can be run with large networks or complex, multi-sector interactions.