The integrated model of airline fleet assignment and aircraft routing based on flight cycle

The tactical planning process of an airline is typically divided into several stages, in which, fleeting, aircraft routing, and crew pairing are three main parts. In the process, the output of fleeting becomes the input to aircraft routing, the output to aircraft routing is in turn the part of the input to crew pairing. Due to this decomposition, the resulting solution is often suboptimal. In this paper, we propose a model that integrates the fleeting and aircraft routing stages in the making-decision process, and guarantees feasible aircraft routings, but neglects the constraints pertain to airport facilities and crew schedule rules. We design a solution methodology to solve the model, which is based on the Branching strategy. The model is test on a computational experiment, the result indicates that the application of the integrated model can improve the aircraft utilization effectively.