Integrated Airline Fleet and Crew Robust Planning

Abstract

The airline fleet assignment problem involves assigning aircraft to flights to maximize profit. Different fleet assignment solutions cause dramatically different performance in subsequent crew-planning and operational processes. We have developed an integrated fleet and crew robust planning method to provide fleet assignment solutions that are both friendly to crew planning and robust to real-time operations. The three challenges of this work are (1) to understand the influence of fleet assignment on crew scheduling; (2) to address crew scheduling in a tractable way in the integrated model; and (3) to achieve robustness. We address these challenges by developing a new approach that integrates crew connections within the fleet assignment model and imposes station purity by limiting the number of fleet types and crew bases allowed to serve each airport. Computational results demonstrate that the proposed approach can reduce crew-planning cost, improve robustness, and solve industrial-size problems with good computational efficiency.