A Novel Model and Decomposition Approach for the Integrated Airline Fleet Assignment, Aircraft Routing, and Crew Pairing Problem

Given a daily flight schedule and a set of aircraft fleets, the airline scheduling problem assigns individual aircraft and groups of crew to each flight based on specific considerations of aircraft maintenance requirements and crew work rules, respectively. Traditionally, this problem has been sequentially broken down into several stages, where the fleet assignment problem, which is solved first, partitions the entire flight network into subnetworks according to fleet types, followed by respectively solving the aircraft routing and crew pairing problems to generate suitable aircraft and crew rotations. However, this sequential approach ignores the interdependencies among the stages, leading to suboptimal, or even infeasible, solutions. In this paper, the authors propose an integrated model and solution approach that incorporates the fleet assignment (with itinerary-based demands), aircraft routing, and crew pairing problems within a single framework. The authors solve the resulting formulation of the problem by using a Benders decomposition approach, along with several acceleration strategies. Computational results obtained by using real-life data from a major U.S. airline demonstrate the benefits of the integrated approach.

• Record URL:
  https://doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2015.0623
• Record URL:
  http://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/trsc.2015.0623
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/oclc/1767714
• Supplemental Notes:
  • Abstracts reprinted with permission of INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, http://www.informs.org).
• Authors:
  • Shao, Shengzhi
  • Sherali, Hanif D
  • Haouari, Mohamed
• Publication Date: 2017-2

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Features: References;
• Pagination: pp 233-249
• Serial:
  • Transportation Science
  • Volume: 51
  • Issue Number: 1
  • Publisher: Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
  • ISSN: 0041-1655
  • Serial URL: http://transci.journal.informs.org/

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Aircraft operations; Airlines; Crew resource management; Linear programming; Routing; Scheduling
• Uncontrolled Terms: Benders decomposition; Fleet assignment
• Subject Areas: Aviation; Operations and Traffic Management; Passenger Transportation; Planning and Forecasting;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01633981
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Mar 7 2017 4:10PM