A heuristic approach for an integrated fleet-assignment, aircraft-routing and crew-pairing problem

This paper deals with the fleet-assignment, aircraft-routing and crew-pairing problems of an airline flying between Canary Islands. There are two major airports (bases). The company is subdivided in three operators. There are no flight during the night. A crew route leaves from and returns to the same base. An aircraft route starts from one base and arrive to the other base due to maintenance requirements. Therefore some crews must change aircrafts, which is an undesired operation. This paper presents a mathematical formulation based on a binary variable for each potential crew and aircraft route, and describes a column-generation algorithm for obtaining heuristic solutions. Computational results on real-world instances are given and compared to manual solutions by the airline.