Robust Airline Fleet Assignment: Imposing Station Purity Using Station Decomposition

Barry C. Smith () and Ellis L. Johnson ()
Additional contact information
Barry C. Smith: Sabre Holdings, 3150 Sabre Drive, Southlake, Texas 76092
Ellis L. Johnson: School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0205

Transportation Science, 2006, vol. 40, issue 4, 497-516

Abstract: Fleet assignment models (FAM) are used by many airlines to assign aircraft to flights in a schedule to maximize profit. Major airlines report that the use of FAM increases annual profits by more than $100 million. The results of FAM affect subsequent planning, marketing, and operational processes within the airline. Anticipating these processes and developing solutions favorable to them can further increase the benefits of FAM. We develop fleet assignment solutions that increase planning flexibility and reduce cost by imposing station purity, limiting the number of fleet types allowed to serve each airport in the schedule. We demonstrate that imposing station purity on the FAM can limit aircraft dispersion in the network and make solutions more robust relative to crew planning, maintenance planning, and operations. Because station purity can significantly degrade computational efficiency, we develop a solution approach, station decomposition, which takes advantage of airline network structure. Station decomposition uses a column generation approach to solving the fleet assignment problem; we further improve the performance of station decomposition by developing a primal-dual method that increases solution quality and model efficiency. Station decomposition solutions can be highly fractional; we develop a “fix-and-price” heuristic to efficiently find integer solutions to the fleet assignment problem. We estimate that the annual net benefit of station purity because of reduced maintenance and crew scheduling costs is greater than $100 million for a major U.S. domestic airline.

Keywords: airline fleet assignment; integer programming; robust scheduling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/trsc.1060.0153 (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:40:y:2006:i:4:p:497-516

Access Statistics for this article

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