Flexible aircraft fleeting and routing at TunisAir

Abstract

This paper addresses a Flexible Aircraft Fleeting and Routing Problem, which is motivated by the Tunisian national carrier TunisAir. A solution to this problem specifies the departure time of each flight, the subset of aircraft to be chartered or rented out, the individual aircraft assigned to each flight, as well as the sequence of flights to be flown by each aircraft. The objective is to maximize the expected total net profit, while satisfying activity constraints and long-term maintenance requirements. Tailored optimization-based heuristics are developed for solving this complex integrated problem. Computational experiments conducted on real data demonstrate that the proposed procedures are effective and robust, and significantly improve upon TunisAir's solutions.

Keywords:

• OR in airlines
• airline fleet assignment
• aircraft routing
• flexible fleet
• flexible flight schedule
• column generation

Acknowledgements

This research has been supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CMMI-0754236. The authors would like to thank Mr. Kamel Berrima, Director of Operations Control Center at TunisAir, for his input on the problem and for providing the data. The authors also thank two anonymous referees for their insightful comments that have helped improve the presentation in this paper.