An Integrated Approach for Airline Flight Selection and Timing, Fleet Assignment, and Aircraft Routing

Hanif D. Sherali (), Ki-Hwan Bae () and Mohamed Haouari ()
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Hanif D. Sherali: Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (0118), Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061
Ki-Hwan Bae: Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (0118), Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061
Mohamed Haouari: Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, College of Engineering, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar

Transportation Science, 2013, vol. 47, issue 4, 455-476

Abstract: Airline profits critically depend on the nature and efficiency of service they provide, and accrue from a complex planning process involving schedule design, fleet assignment, aircraft routing, and crew scheduling, which are interrelated to each other within the overall system. We propose in this paper a model that integrates certain aspects of the schedule design, fleet assignment, and aircraft-routing processes, while considering flight retiming and demand recapture issues, along with optional legs, itinerary-based demands, and multiple fare classes. Maintenance routing decisions, as well as through-flight opportunities, are additionally incorporated in our model, and we apply the reformulation-linearization technique to reduce its complexity while introducing hierarchical symmetry-breaking constraints, along with other classes of valid inequalities, to enhance its solvability. A Benders' decomposition-based method is designed to handle the resulting large-scale model formulation. Computational results using real data obtained from United Airlines are presented to demonstrate the potential profitability in applying the proposed approach.

Keywords: integrated airline operations; schedule design; fleet assignment; aircraft routing; flight retiming; demand recapture; reformulation-linearization technique (RLT); symmetry breaking; valid inequalities; Benders' decomposition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

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