A hierarchical metamodeling approach for airline costs

Costs are a crucial basis for every decision process that combines resources to provide a product or service. Airlines decide on cost information about aircraft orders, route adaptions and business model changes. This paper shows a hierarchical metamodeling approach for airline total operation costs. In particular, we establish a hierarchy that supports the decision-making processes to address any operational-driven impact to the air transportation system. First use case is the business model of the long-haul low-cost carrier. The model currently overestimates the total operating costs. The reasons for the overestimation are the varying cost items of different airline business types and world regions as well as the lack of an appropriate activity-based cost model for the airline sector to assign overhead costs.