Large-Scale Model and Solution for Integrated Maintenance Routing and Tail Assignment Problem in Airline Industry

Abstract

The airline planning and scheduling functions are generally performed in sequential manner which makes the schedule yield to disruptions. This paper presents an integrated maintenance routing and tail assignment problem (IMRTAP), a paradigm of embedding the tactical and operational planning. This is a relatively new approach in airline planning where the aircraft routing is re-optimised with the consideration of tail assignment and semi-integration of crew scheduling. This aids in the design of a more robust schedule with up-to-date operational information regarding the aircraft. The problem is formulated as a combination of set partition and multi-commodity network model. The model is solved using a modified restrict-and-relax as an efficient strategy to tackle large-scale instances. Six real-world instances are used to test the model with the problem size as large as 50 lakh variables in the largest instance. In addition to efficient solving, perturbation is introduced to the problem to deal with degeneracy in large problems.