Integrated Airline Schedule Design and Fleet Assignment: Polyhedral Analysis and Benders' Decomposition Approach

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Date
2010
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
INFORMS
Abstract

The main airline operations consist of schedule planning, fleet assignment, aircraft routing, and crew scheduling. To improve profitability, we present in this paper an integrated fleet assignment model with schedule planning by simultaneously considering optional flight legs to select along with the assignment of aircraft types to all scheduled legs. In addition, we consider itinerary-based demands for multiple fare classes. A polyhedral analysis is conducted of the proposed mixed-integer programming model to tighten its representation via several classes of valid inequalities. Solution approaches are developed by applying Benders' decomposition method to the resulting lifted model, and computational results are presented using real data obtained from a major U. S. airline to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed procedures.

Description
Keywords
Integrated airline operations, Flight scheduling, Fleet assignment, Valid inequalities, Benders' decomposition, Maintenance routing problem, Algorithms, Models
Citation
Sherali, Hanif D.; Bae, Ki-Hwan; Haouari, Mohamed. Integrated Airline Schedule Design and Fleet Assignment: Polyhedral Analysis and Benders' Decomposition Approach. INFORMS Journal on Computing 2010 22:4, 500-513. doi: 10.1287/ijoc.1090.0368