Integrated Linear Integer Model of a Fleet Allocation and Aircraft Routing Problem with Operational Constraints

Abstract

One of the topics that have been studied a lot in the field of airline industry optimization is related to flight planning, and air fleets, and how they relate to each other, which is called airline scheduling. Despite the high importance of this issue in the profitability of airline companies and the proper use of their resources, the high computational complexity of these models has led to considering each of them in a mathematical model separately, and as a result, the accuracy of the final decision will be decreased. So far, many articles have studied various relevant issues, in some cases, efforts to create integration in the process can be observed. However, there is a few operational views of the issue, and some key requirements were neglected due to the simplification of provided models. In this study, an integrated model of the two main stages of airline planning, including fleet allocation and aircraft maintenance routing, is considered simultaneously, and the performance of the developed model is investigated using real data from one of the airlines. Also, a sensitivity analysis of the model to some relevant parameters confirms the validity of the developed mathematical model and the solution algorithm. Then, a comparative study was investigated to compare the performance of the developed model with the operational method, including solving sub-problems stepwise. Also, the results are compared with the developed and similar method from the previous studies. The results confirm the superiority of the developed mathematical model.