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Integrated Airline Fleet and Crew Robust Planning

Sabre Holdings, Southlake, Texas 76092
H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332
H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332
chunhua.gao{at}sabre.com
ejohnson{at}isye.gatech.edu
barrycsmith{at}mac.com

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.

Key Words: airline integrated planning; integer programming; robust scheduling
History: Received: November 2007; revised: June 2008; accepted: August 2008.