Optimizing Seat Layout for Commercial Aviation

Sammanfattning

This thesis investigates whether integer linear programming can identify a revenue-maximising seat allocation on a long-haul commercial route subject to physical, environmental and demand constraints. Using the Airbus A350-1000 operated on the London Heathrow-New York JFK route as a case study, the research develops an optimization model that balances revenue objectives with operational and environmental considerations. The study incorporates real-world data from four operating airlines across six booking horizons, examines per-class CO₂ attribution, and a route-level load factor. We develop three nested models with increasing realism. The base model treats cabin capacity as a single floor-area budget. The refined model replaces this with per-row length constraints that account for fixed galley and lavatory space, yielding a more faithful representation of cabin geometry. The realistic model further incorporates class-specific load factors to scale revenue. The optimal cabin configuration includes 297 Economy, 48 Premium Economy, and 40 Business seats, generating approximately $580,000 revenue per departure. Notably, the CO_2 constraint proves binding across all formulations and actively reshapes, rather than merely limits, the cabin mix. A sensitivity analysis over the per-passenger CO_2 ceiling shows that expected revenue varies by more than 50% across the range examined. The result reframes environmental compliance as a parameter that directly determines the achievable revenue rather than as a fixed cost subtracted from it.