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Airline Fleet Assignment with Enhanced Revenue Modeling

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853
Department of Civil Engineering, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 10330, Thailand
cbarnhart{at}mit.edu
aaf33{at}cornell.edu
lmanoj{at}alum.mit.edu

The airline fleet assignment problem addresses the question of how to best assign aircraft fleet types to scheduled flight legs. This paper presents the subnetwork fleet assignment model: a model that employs composite decision variables representing the simultaneous assignment of fleet types to subnetworks of one or more flight legs. The formulation is motivated by the need to better model the revenue side of the objective function. We present a solution method designed to balance revenue approximation and model tractability. Computational results suggest that the approach yields profit improvements over comparable models and that it is computationally tractable for problems of practical size.

Subject classifications: transportation; airline models; programming; Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition.
History: Received October 2006; revision received February 2007; accepted March 2007.