Integrated model for fleet routing, flight scheduling and aircraft rental planning

Fleet routing, flight scheduling and aircraft renting play a key role in airline carrier operations. This research aims at developing a model to assist carriers in drafting flight timetables, providing better fleet routes, and making rental plans when market demand conditions are expected to change in the near future. The model is constructed as a time-space network and formulated as a network flow problem with side constraints. A Lagrangian-based algorithm, based on Lagrangian relaxation, a subgradient method, the network simplex method and a Lagrangian heuristic, is developed to solve the problem. To show how to apply the model in the real world, a case study regarding the operations of a major Taiwan airline carrier is demonstrated.