Integrated Airline Fleet and Crew Robust Planning

Generating Crew Pairings for Very Large Flight Networks

Airline operations depend on the complex control of many expensive, tightly-constrained, interdependent resources such as crews and aircraft. Operations research (OR) has played an important role in developing planning tools for this complex system. In recent years, however, the already intense pressure on the airline industry has dramatically increased due to rising fuel costs, competitive pri...

Robust Airline Schedule Planning: Minimizing Propagated Delay in an Integrated Routing and Crewing Framework

F reasons of tractability, the airline scheduling problem has traditionally been sequentially decomposed into various stages (e.g., schedule generation, fleet assignment, aircraft routing, and crew pairing), with the decisions from one stage imposed upon the decision making process in subsequent stages. Although this approach greatly simplifies the solution process, it unfortunately fails to ca...

Integrated Airline Operations: Schedule Design, Fleet Assignment, Aircraft Routing, and Crew Scheduling

Models and Algorithms for an Integrated Fleet-Assignment, Aircraft-Routing and Crew-Pairing Problem

We study an optimization problem of a regional airline company. The problem integrates three stages of the planning process that are typically solved in sequence: fleet assignment, aircraft routing and crew pairing. Aircraft maintenance is also taken into account. We present two mathematical formulations for the integrated problem. One formulation could be considered the natural model where bot...

Airline Schedule Planning: Integrated Models and Algorithms for Schedule Design and Fleet Assignment

C a profitable schedule is of utmost importance to an airline because its profitability is critically influenced by its flight offerings. We focus our attention on the steps of the airline schedule planning process involving schedule design and fleet assignment. Airline schedule design involves determining when and where to offer flights such that profits are maximized, and fleet assignment inv...