Application of Simulated Annealing Algorithm in Airline Fleet Assignment Problem

Airline fleet assignment problem, which means assigning right aircraft types to proper flights to make airlines´ profit maximum, is an important part in airline production schedule and organization. Though analyzing the characteristic of chinese single hub and spoke network, we compose flight pairings by connecting the time and space associated flights. Then, according to the departure and complete time of flight pairings, the time sequence network is constructed, in which the fleet assignment is transfered to the network flow model. Finally, the direct path decomposition is used to design simulated annealing algorithm for fleet assignment. The simulations indicate the proposed algorithm´s average CPU time is 04.18 seconds and the total assigning profit is stable for the scale of 40 flight parings daily, 7 airplane types and 22 airplanes. The result shows this idea is effective.