A matheuristic for the robust integrated airline fleet assignment, aircraft routing, and crew pairing problem

We address an integrated airline scheduling problem that combines three airline planning processes: fleet assignment, aircraft routing, and crew pairing. For a given daily flight schedule, the problem requires simultaneously assigning aircraft and crews to each scheduled flight, taking into account aircraft maintenance restrictions and crew work rules. We propose to solve this complex problem of integrated flight planning while taking into account robustness considerations. In this regard, robustness is achieved by restricting tight connections in the schedule and increasing the number of connections where crews follow the aircraft. We formulate the problem using a very large-scale, yet compact, mixed-integer programming model, and we propose a matheuristic consisting of a decomposition approach and a proximity search algorithm. Computational experiments carried out on real instances from a major airline and having up to 14,014 itineraries, 646 flights, and 202 aircraft provide evidence of the proposed approach’s efficacy. In particular, we find that the average deviation from a conservative bound is at most equal to 0.6%. •We propose a compact MINP model for the robust integrated airline scheduling problem.•We linearize the model using the RLT technique of Sherali and Adams (1990, 1994).•We apply a matheuristic that combines a decomposition approach and proximity search.•The decomposition approach is used to build a feasible solution to the problem.•Starting from a very good solution, the proximity search improves it iteratively.•The matheuristic was tested using data obtained from a major international airline.