Aircraft-flight assignment methods for airlines: monthly static and daily dynamic applications

Nowadays airline transportation is the fastest type of transportation. With advancement of the aviation technologies, the plane's increased speed, and high number of companies that enter to the airway transportation sector, leads to high competition rate and decreased ticket prices. Decreased ticket prices in airline transportation makes transportation expenses comparable with other transportation types. This change creates a competitive airline market. This structure forces airline companies to make professional decisions for their activities such as schedule design, fleet assignment, aircraft routing, maintenance scheduling and crew pairing, etc. In order to increase profit of airline companies and assign fleet-aircraft-crew-gate optimally, several methods have been used and better results have been gained with integrating various activities. In this paper, integrated aircraft routing and maintenance scheduling model is developed to use the data of the largest Airline Company in Turkey, Turkish Airlines. This model includes all destinations of the A330-300 fleet type. For an application, we first developed an algorithm which minimizes required aircraft, cancelled flights, idle time while ensures robustness. In order to verify the model, we solved a small number of sample data by optimization software (Lingo 8.0). The full data set, which includes all destinations, and aircraft routing and maintenance scheduling integration coded and solved in C++. Finally we got the integrated solution which minimizes required aircraft, cancelled flights, idle time and ensures robustness at the same time. Furthermore the model coded using MATLAB with 8 different algorithms for more regular assignment and ensuring robustness and more robust schedule obtained.