A NEW APPROACH TO FLEET ASSIGNMENT AND AIRCRAFT ROUTING PROBLEMS

Abstract

In this study, a new mathematical formulation is developed for fleet scheduling problems (i.e., the combination of fleet assignment and aircraft routing problems) in single hub & spoke systems. The proposed model aims to minimize the total cost of allocating aircraft to flights while observing the sequence of flights to be subject to seat capacity, passenger demand, aircraft availability, and overlapping flights. Since the classical fleet scheduling problem is NP-hard, a couple of complexity reduction techniques are developed. Thus, the size of the problem is decreased significantly. To evaluate the model’s performance, it is implemented to an airline carrier with 170 aircraft and 1290 (645 round trip) flights. As a result, the proposed method ended up with an improvement of 36.7% for a 2-day planning horizon.