A DECISION-SUPPORT FRAMEWORK FOR MULTI-FLEET ROUTING AND MULTI-STOP FLIGHT SCHEDULING

Fleet routing and flight scheduling are important in airline carrier o perations. Ineffective and inefficient fleet routing and flight schedu ling will result in a substantial loss of profits. This research aims at developing a framework to help carriers adjust their draft timetabl es and fleet routes, when market demand conditions are expected to cha nge in the near future. The framework is based on a basic model, const ructed as a multi-fleet time-space network from which several strategi c models are developed, to help carriers in fleet routing and flight s cheduling. These models are formulated as multiple commodity network h ow problems. The Lagrangian relaxation accompanied by the network simp lex method, a Lagrangian heuristic and a modified sub-gradient method are suggested to solve the problems. A how decomposition algorithm is also suggested in order to trace every aircraft route. To show how to apply this framework in the real world, a case study regarding the int ernational operations of a major Taiwan airline was performed. The res ults show that the framework would be useful for actual operations. Co pyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd