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Perturbations of flight schedule resulted from aircraft maintenances often occur in a carrier''s short-term operations. Unsuitable fleet routing and flight scheduling will cause substantial loss of profit and decreased levels of service and safety for airline carriers. It is essential to an airline carrier''s operations to have efficient and effective scheduling techniques to handle such schedule perturbations in short term operations. This research aims to develop a decision framework to assist carriers in flight scheduling and fleet routing for schedule perturbations in the operations of mult-fleet and multi-stop flights. The framework is based on a basis model constructed as a multi-fleet time-space network from which strategic models are developed to assist carriers in handling schedule perturbations under aircraft maintenances.
These network models are formulated as multiple commodity network flow problems which are characterized as NP-complete problems. Lagrangian relaxation with subgradient methods accompanied by the network simplex method and a Lagrangian heuristic are developed to solve the problems. Then a flow decomposition algorithm is developed to solve each aircraft route. To evaluate the framework in real world, a case study regarding the international operations of a major Taiwan airline carrier was performed. The results show that the framework could be useful for actual operations.
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