An integrated approach for airline flight selection and timing, fleet assignment, and aircraft routing

Abstract

Airline 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 2013 INFORMS.