A Bi-Objective Optimization Approach for Inflight Food Waste Reduction

For airline industry, an excess of inflight food waste has been highlighted as one of the crucial concerns that affecting airline's profit margin and operations. Furthermore, it may result in environmental issue if excessive food waste is not handled with care. As such, ensuring an optimal inflight catering service is particularly important to airlines. However, the existing literatures focusing on the reduction of inflight food waste is very limited. Correspondingly, this paper develops a bi-objective inflight food waste reduction model, with the aim to minimize inflight food waste while maximizing passengers' expectation towards inflight catering service. In particular, an optimal strategy of offering inflight meals (comprise standard and light meals) is proposed appropriately to meet the demand of passengers under uncertainty. By examining some international flights, the results of an illustrative case study show that the developed model is viable to reduce airline's inflight food waste to a greater extent. Besides, the airline would have greater flexibility to meet the expectations of the passengers in a better manner. It is anticipated that the developed model would reveal some useful insights to the airlines in providing inflight catering services profitably and environmentally.