Sónia Carvalho Teixeira

Abstract
In order to improve their competitive performance, airline companies often adopt as a strategy to establish arrangement between two or more organizations agreeing to cooperate on a substantial level. This strategy is often known as airline alliances. A paradigm to analyze the collective intelligence behavior which emerges from a group, as a strategic alliance, is the flocking behavior. Inspired by the Cucker and Smale algorithm (C-S) we propose a new version of the flocking behavior algorithm applied to airline alliances. Our goal is to understand the link between strategic alliances and flocks. For this new approach, metrics were obtained for the parameters of C-S algorithm, namely position, velocity and influence, where the latter uses cooperative games. Besides, reinforcement learning mechanisms have been explored. Some relevant outputs for airline alliances as the permanence rate and the growth rate were computed for each of the five configurations in analysis.