Optimization of payload multi-step strategy in the case of meteorological uncertainties

Before take-o, Airlines have to make decisions concerning payload sales at predefined time steps. These decisions may depend on uncertain time-evolutive meteorological forecasts. Therefore the payload sale strategy can be viewed as a sequential decision-making process which has to be optimized. The purpose of this paper is to define an original probabilistic framework for this decision-making process. We also provide a dynamic programming based optimization method to choose the sale payload amount at each predefined steps, in order to maximize the statistical expected profit. Our approach is illustrated by experimental results on both simplified aircraft and meteorological models.