A Novel Model and Decomposition Approach for the Integrated Airline Fleet Assignment, Aircraft Routing, and Crew Pairing Problem
针对航空公司调度中机队分配、飞机排班和机组配对三个环节的相互依赖问题，提出一体化模型和Benders分解求解方法，用美国某大型航空公司的真实数据验证了集成方法的优势。
Given a daily flight schedule and a set of aircraft fleets, the airline scheduling problem assigns individual aircraft and groups of crew to each flight based on specific considerations of aircraft maintenance requirements and crew work rules, respectively. Traditionally, this problem has been sequentially broken down into several stages, where the fleet assignment problem, which is solved first, partitions the entire flight network into subnetworks according to fleet types, followed by respectively solving the aircraft routing and crew pairing problems to generate suitable aircraft and crew rotations. However, this sequential approach ignores the interdependencies among the stages, leading to suboptimal, or even infeasible, solutions. In this paper, we propose an integrated model and solution approach that incorporates the fleet assignment (with itinerary-based demands), aircraft routing, and crew pairing problems within a single framework. We solve the resulting formulation of the problem by using a Benders decomposition approach, along with several acceleration strategies. Computational results obtained by using real-life data from a major U.S. airline demonstrate the benefits of the integrated approach.