Patent ID: 7957987

Claim:
An article of manufacture for scheduling airline flights comprising computer readable instructions embodied on a tangible media and operable to: identify airport information for each of a plurality of airports, the airport information including a geographic location, an airport identifier, flights departing from the airport including a flight identifier, an indication of a destination airport, an indication of a departure time, and a number of passengers for the flight; identify previously scheduled flights between airports that are not assigned an aircraft; identify aircraft information associated with a plurality of available aircrafts including an aircraft identifier, a passenger capacity, an overhead cost for each flight regardless of number of passengers on a flight flown by the aircraft, and a passenger cost for each passenger on a flight flown by the aircraft; receive bids to service the flights that have not been assigned aircrafts; assign the bids to generate an initial schedule of flights; determine whether an overall cost of all flights in the initial schedule violates a predetermined cost parameter; and in response to at least the violation, re-assign aircrafts to the unassigned flights without changing the flights to generate a subsequent schedule different from the initial schedule.