As the number of countries liberalizing their skies increases, some airlines, notably carriers in the Middle East, have extended their hub-and-spoke networks beyond domestic borders. This allows them to serve international destinations without the need to go through traditional gateway hubs, so that they can compete with airline alliances relying on the traditional dual-gateway, or the so-called “dog-bone” networks. This paper proposes a stochastic optimization model to address the location choice issue of additional gateway airports, with a consideration of the competition between airlines running traditional dog-bone networks and hub-and-spoke networks in a liberalizing inter-continental market. A two-stage approach is adopted to model the effects of demand uncertainty. In the first stage, the future passenger demand is not observable and thus airlines or airline alliances aim to maximize their own expected profit by choosing additional gateway airports from the set of candidate gateway airports pre-specified by the regulator. In the second stage, with the passenger demand observed and the gateway scheme fixed, airlines determine their aircraft sizes and service frequencies to maximize their own profit, and air passengers choose routes that minimize their own travel disutility. Based on a calibration of the demand dispersion parameters in elastic demand function, the proposed model is applied to the China-Europe aviation market, which includes the inter-continental international market and the associated Chinese and European domestic markets, so that to ascertain the comparative advantages of different network configurations. The social welfares of the system under different demand scenarios and different gateway schemes are compared, and the sensitivity analyses of some parameters are also implemented.

随着开放天空的国家数量的增加，一些航空公司，特别是中东的航空公司，已经将其轮辐式网络扩展到了国内边界之外。这使他们无需经过传统的网关枢纽就能为国际目的地提供服务，从而使他们可以与依靠传统的双网关或所谓的“狗骨头”网络的航空公司联盟竞争。考虑到在开放的洲际市场中运行传统狗骨网络和轮辐网络的航空公司之间的竞争，本文提出了一种随机优化模型来解决其他网关机场的选址问题。采用两阶段方法来模拟需求不确​​定性的影响。在第一阶段 未来的乘客需求无法观察到，因此航空公司或航空公司联盟旨在通过从监管机构预先指定的候选网关机场中选择其他网关机场，以最大限度地提高自身的预期利润。在第二阶段，在观察到乘客需求并确定网关方案的情况下，航空公司确定其飞机尺寸和服务频率以最大程度地提高自身利润，而空中乘客则选择将自身旅行无效性降至最低的路线。基于对弹性需求函数中需求分散参数的标定，该模型被应用于中欧航空市场，该市场包括洲际国际市场以及相关的中欧国内市场，以便确定可比性。不同网络配置的优势。