Title: Some fleet routing and scheduling problems for air transportation systems.
Authors: Levin, Amos
Publisher: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Flight Transportation Laboratory,
Year: 1969
Subjects: Production scheduling.; Airlines Management; Linear programming
Abstract: The purpose of this work is to formulate and develop practicable solution methods to some important fleet routing, scheduling and fleet composition problems. These problems arise in the operation of air transportation systems like the operating domestic and international airlines. The problem of minimal fleet size to meet a variable schedule, which will be fixed when the system goes into operation, is formulated in several ways as Integer Linear Programs in 0-1 variables. The ILP's obtained are large scale programs and solved here by Land and Doig type Branch and Bound algorithms. The computational experiments with them, which were conducted with MPS/360, have been very sucessful and in the majority of cases, particularly when larger systems are solved, the algorithms terminated at the optimal integer solutions after a single iteration. The problem of scheduling and routing the minimal fleet is then formulated as an ILP which has exhibited equally successful computational results.^