A Multi-commodity Flow Formulation for the Integrated Aircraft Routing, Crew Pairing, and Tail Assignment Problem

Abstract

The integrated aircraft routing, crew pairing, and tail assignment problem consists of simultaneously nding a minimum cost set of aircraft routes and crew pairings such that each ight is covered by one aircraft and one crew. A common problem when integrating airline planning stages is the long planning horizon of the crew pairing problem. We propose an approach in which crews initially are only told when they work. This enables us to generate an overall schedule much closer to the start of the planning horizon. Therefore, along with a short planning horizon, much more detailed and accurate overall schedules can be generated. Due to the tail assignment aspect of the problem maintenance requirements have to be satis ed for each aircraft. Robustness of solutions is increased by using penal- ties on short connections. We propose a mixed integer multi commodity ow formulation and report results for small instances.