An integrated mathematical model for aircraft routing and crew scheduling for airlines with multi fleet and multi maintenance hub

Abstract

The problem of Airline planning has totally been divided into four sub-problems.These problems include Flight Scheduling, Fleet Assignment, Aircraft Routing, Maintenance, and Crew Scheduling. In this research, firstly, we defined basic concepts and common terminology about Airline Planning then early models and previous researchers were presenting investigated articles. Moreover, by identifying existing research gaps, an Integrated Mathematical model presented for Aircraft Routing and Crew Scheduling for Airlines with Multi Fleet and Multi Maintenance hub with considering the rules of the Airlines. The main purpose of the proposed model is to determine the flight chains for each aircraft and crew assignments to all aircrafts with the attention to the airlines rules and regulations for aircrafts and crew. In the integrated models by previous researcher in this field, usually the type of fleet is considered the same while in the model presented in this research, the type of fleet is considered different. Other innovations of this research consider several maintenance units for an airline. In addition, the minimizations of deadheading flights for crew and aircraft that can impose heavy costs to the airline is presented as a part of the objective function in the model presented. Finally, the problem has been solved into small dimensions by GAMS software and in order to solve it in the larger dimensions a meta-heuristic method is being used, such as genetics algorithm. At the end, we have presented the results, which came from meta-heuristic Algorithm and GAMS Software.

Keywords

• aircraft routing and maintenance
• crew scheduling
• multi fleet
• multi maintenance hub
• genetics algorithm