Earlier airlines worked in silos to develop their global networks to earn profits in their domestic and the international territories. With the growing demand for interconnectedness, the airlines have started to collaborate and compete simultaneously to expand their networks to earn sustainable profits. In this study, we explore the duopoly coopetitive profit maximizing intercontinental hub location problem. We establish the hypothesis that airlines do need coopetitive alliances as the operating cost and competition is rising and profit margin is shrinking. We propose a two-phased mixed-integer linear programming formulation under duopoly setting to determine the airlines’ individual networks and intercontinental hub links to route the demands through these jointly established arcs. We develop various collaborative and competitive cost functions and propose a new dataset for 25 cities from the European Union, UK and Russia. We introduce formulation strengthening properties and valid inequalities to converge towards optimal solution faster. Various numerical experiments under varying parameter settings in both non-coopetitive and coopetitive scenarios are performed and financially beneficial scenarios are suggested for the airlines. The results highlight that the profit levels are unstable when airlines operate in silos or when they decide to go into direct competition. Results further show that the coopetitive alliance ensures stable profit levels, reduces infrastructural duplication and leads to a win–win situation in terms of profits in majority of the scenarios for both the airlines.

早期的航空公司各自为战以发展其全球网络，以在其国内和国际领土上赚取利润。随着对互联互通的需求不断增长，航空公司开始合作和同时竞争，以扩展其网络以获得可持续的利润。在这项研究中，我们探讨了双寡头合作竞争利润最大化洲际枢纽选址问题。我们假设航空公司确实需要竞争联盟，因为运营成本和竞争正在上升，利润率正在下降。我们提出了双寡头设置下的两阶段混合整数线性规划公式，以确定航空公司的各个网络和洲际枢纽链接，以通过这些共同建立的弧线来路由需求。我们开发了各种协作和竞争成本函数，并为来自欧盟、英国和俄罗斯的 25 个城市提出了一个新的数据集。我们引入了公式强化属性和有效的不等式以更快地收敛到最优解。在非竞争性和竞争性场景中，在不同参数设置下进行了各种数值实验，并为航空公司建议了经济上有利的场景。结果表明，当航空公司在孤岛中运营或决定进入直接竞争时，利润水平是不稳定的。结果进一步表明，竞争联盟确保了稳定的利润水平，减少了基础设施的重复，并在两家航空公司的大多数情况下实现了利润双赢。