Operations research and airlines : solving the meal provisioning problem

This paper investigates the problem of meal provisioning on airplanes. Usually, there are several moments that an airline can order meals for a flight, and as the day of the flight comes closer, the price of the meals increase. On the other hand, as the day of the flight gets closer, the airline has more information about how many tickets will be solved. Using Operations Research methods such as Monte Carlo simulation and analytically (Newsboy problem), we will solve the simplified problem of only having one decision moment. Then we will focus on the main problem of having three decision moments. We will solve this using Stochastic Dynamic Programming (SDP). For all methods, Python is used to program and get results. The Monte Carlo simulation and the Newsboy approach both came to the same conclusions, which is very strong. The SDP gave us different results, as this method has multiple decision moments.