Demand Forecasting Framework for Optimum Resource Planning

Abstract

Airline’s margins are being squeezed by the stiff competition, slowing demand and increasing labour costs. Good planning and effective utilization of resources is a matter of key importance for the persistent growth of airlines. The increasing amount of unplanned absences due to crew sickness/fatigue also resulted in planning more on-call pilots and flight attendants at each base. Due to the high operational cost and the financial impact of not having enough staff to fly a plane, a more accurate gauge of crew standbys needed every day will help airlines in reducing the operational cost and helps in preventing disruptions. This study proposes a time series forecasting framework to manage the standby planning process smoothly and to eliminate all possible risks associated with the reserves for making the airline’s operations successful. The framework includes auto-selected configurations for defining a best-fitting model and an extraction module for forecasting the values. Further, the system can be utilized for predicting the upper and lower control limits of the predicted output to handle the uncertainties in the data points.