Course planning at Lufthansa Technical Training: Constructing more profitable schedules

Lufthansa Technical Training GmbH (LTT) runs training courses for Lufthansa Technik AG and for several other international airlines. It offers about 6 70 types of courses of which several hundred take place each year. The cour se-scheduling problem LTT faces is to develop a schedule for the year that maximizes its profit while meeting complex precedence, temporal, and resour ce-related constraints. A good operational schedule should also meet a numb er of subordinate objectives. In the past, LTT did all its scheduling manua lly. We developed a prototype course-scheduling module, using the operation al planning situation of 1996 as our major test instance. It turned out tha t most of the schedules generated were substantially better than the soluti on LTT constructed manually, both in terms of profit and computation time. We subsequently developed a fully fledged decision-support system.