Airline Simulation: Case Study of a Regional Airline Company

Pedro Henrique Minaya Carvalho¹; Ricardo Poley Martins Ferreira¹

¹ Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais - UFMG

doi:10.20906/CPS/CILAMCE2017-1255

Resumo

The purpose of this paper is developing a simulation of a regional airline company. For this, it was decided to study a specific case presenting the methods to implement the simulation and their respective results and analyzes. The main goal of this work is to create a tool that can be able to present results needed to analyze the economic viability of a regional airline. The regional flights are of great importance for the economic development of remote regions because they encourage the regional business and tourism. Currently, in Brazil, there are only three main companies that offer this service, requiring greater incentive and government planning. In August 2016, The Company of economic development of Minas Gerais (CODEMIG) and State Secretary of transportation and public works, created the Voe Minas Gerais Project (PIRMA) connecting the cities of Minas Gerais with its capital, Belo Horizonte. The project aims to promote the regional development and encourage the emergence of new regional airlines. The Voe Minas Gerais Project was selected for the case study of simulation and analysis in this work. The type of simulation applied was the agent-based simulation. For this, NetLogo was chosen as the simulation platform. NetLogo is an agent-based simulation software and it was chosen because its accessibility. The agents of the simulation are the airports and airplanes of the company. It was developed two types of simulation scenarios, the route analysis that performs the complete data analysis for each flight stretch of the airline, and the period analysis that performs a daily and weekly simulation of the airline in order to verify its actual condition. The analysis in this specific case has shown that most of the flights require a full aircraft to reach a breakeven condition. Therefore, the value of tickets in combination with discounts is low when compared to the expenses of each flight. In addition, daily and weekly analysis presented negative balances. However, through the simulation used in this work it wa

Palavras-chave: Simulation; Regional Airline Company; Voe Minas Gerais Project