An Integrated Approach for Airline Flight Selection and Timing, Fleet Assignment, and Aircraft Routing

Abstract

A irline profits critically depend on the nature and efficiency of service they provide, and accrue from a complex planning process involving schedule design, fleet assignment, aircraft routing, and crew scheduling, which are interrelated to each other within the overall system. We propose in this paper a model that integrates certain aspects of the schedule design, fleet assignment, and aircraft-routing processes, while considering flight retiming and demand recapture issues, along with optional legs, itinerary-based demands, and multiple fare classes. Maintenance routing decisions, as well as through-flight opportunities, are additionally incorporated in our model, and we apply the reformulation-linearization technique to reduce its complexity while introducing hierarchical symmetry-breaking constraints, along with other classes of valid inequalities, to enhance its solvability. A Benders' decomposition-based method is designed to handle the resulting large-scale model formulation. Computational results using real data obtained from United Airlines are presented to demonstrate the potential profitability in applying the proposed approach.

Dynamic Vehicle Scheduling for Working Service Network with Dual Demands

“…Liang and Chaovalitwongse [21] presented a network-based mixed integer linear programming formulation for the aircraft maintenance with the weekly fleet assignment and developed a diving heuristic approach. Sherali et al [22] proposed a model that integrates certain aspects of the schedule design fleet assignment and aircraft-routing process and designed Benders's decomposition-based method. The liner shipping fleet repositioning problem (LSFRP) was formulated as a novel mathematical model and a simulated annealing algorithm is proposed for the LSFRP by Tierney et al [23].…”

An integrated approach for airline scheduling, aircraft fleeting and routing with cruise speed control

“…The first one is that we limit the total cruise time for each aircraft on a day. A similar approach is used by Sherali et al (2013b), they use a limit (k t ) on total flight hours of each aircraft on a day. The second one is that the first and the last airport of an aircraft is predetermined on a day similar to the study of Aloulou et al (2013).…”

“…Aktürk et al (2014) is the first study that makes use of speed control in the context of airline schedule recovery from disruptions. Sherali et al (2013b) propose an approach in which they integrate the schedule design, fleet assignment, and aircraft-routing problems within the consideration of flight selection, departure timing and maintenance requirements. For maintenance requirements, they use a limit on total flight time of each aircraft that might be different for each fleet type.…”

Two-Stage Heuristic Algorithm for Aircraft Recovery Problem

“…Scheduling is greatly significant to the airline industry because of its direct impact on the cost and service level. Accordingly, numerous optimization methods have been developed [1][2][3] to generate high-quality schedules, which can efficiently utilize costly resources (aircraft, crews, passengers, etc.). However, over the course of nominal airline operations, disruptions, such as severe weather conditions, unplanned maintenance, and air space control, frequently make airlines suffer from significant loss.…”