Reliability evaluation of a multi-state air transportation network meeting multiple travel demands

In last decades, air transportation plays an important role in global economy. Several scholars have studied optimizing air transportation system or proposed reliability evaluation algorithms from airline management viewpoints. This work evaluates the reliability of an air transportation system from the perspective of travel agency instead. An air transportation system can be modeled as a multi-state air transportation network (MATN) wherein each node represents an airport and each arc denotes a flight carrying passengers between a pair of airports from scheduled departure time to scheduled arrival time. Significantly, this study focuses on investigating the reliability of multiple travel demands. Therefore, the reliability of an MATN is defined as the probability that a set of demands can be carried successfully under constraints of time and number of stopovers. This study employs the concept of minimal paths in reliability evaluation. Subsequently, a searching procedure is added to the proposed algorithm. In addition, an illustrative example and a case study are utilized to demonstrate the proposed algorithm and discuss the implications of reliability evaluation for the management of travel agency.