Towards a transportation network model for air taxi dispatch planning

With the existing air transportation network approaching saturation and accompanying improvements in small aircraft technology, there is growing interest in the study and development of on-demand air taxi services utilizing small community airports. Motivated by traffic engineering problems in various network infrastructures, this study presents a model for an air taxi network using gradient optimization to maximize profit and iteratively adjust prices for the network. Initially, the model fixes allocations of aircraft between pairs of regional airports in the network. Preliminary results show that the model converges on a vector of prices which result in profitable weekly service under given costs. Next, we introduce a few potential strategies for changing the allocations of aircraft across the network, with the purpose of gaining insight into the effects and usefulness of different types of provisioning schemes. Additionally, specific parameters of the model are varied with an interest in characterizing conditions for the efficacy and profitability of the network.