Flight String Models for Aircraft Fleeting and Routing

Cynthia Barnhart, Natashia L. Boland, Lloyd W. Clarke, Ellis L. Johnson, George L. Nemhauser and Rajesh G. Shenoi
Additional contact information
Cynthia Barnhart: Center for Transportation Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
Natashia L. Boland: Department of Mathematics, University of Melbourne, Parkville VIC 3052 Australia
Lloyd W. Clarke: School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0205
Ellis L. Johnson: School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0205
George L. Nemhauser: School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0205
Rajesh G. Shenoi: McKinsey & Company, 2 Houston Center, Suite 3500, Houston, Texas 77010

Transportation Science, 1998, vol. 32, issue 3, 208-220

Abstract: Given a schedule of flight legs to be flown by an airline, the fleet assignment problem is to determine the minimum cost assignment of flights to aircraft types, called fleets, such that each scheduled flight is assigned to exactly one fleet, and the resulting assignment is feasible to fly given a limited number of aircraft in each fleet. Then the airline must determine a sequence of flights, or routes, to be flown by individual aircraft such that assigned flights are included in exactly one route, and all aircraft can be maintained as necessary. This is referred to as the aircraft routing problem. In this paper, we present a single model and solution approach to solve simultaneously the fleet assignment and aircraft routing problems. Our approach is robust in that it can capture costs associated with aircraft connections and complicating constraints such as maintenance requirements. By setting the number of fleets to one, our approach can be used to solve the aircraft routing problem alone. We show how to extend our model and solution approach to solve aircraft routing problems with additional constraints requiring equal aircraft utilization. With data provided by airlines, we provide computational results for the combined fleet assignment and aircraft routing problems without equal utilization requirements and for aircraft routing problems requiring equal aircraft utilization.

Date: 1998
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (87)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/trsc.32.3.208 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ortrsc:v:32:y:1998:i:3:p:208-220

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Transportation Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().