Crew Pairing and Aircraft Routing for On-Demand Aviation with Time Window

On-demand air transportation provides passengers a convenient option flying point-to-point directly anytime at their requests. Although it's convenient to customers, this type of non-scheduled service posts great challenge to the management companies, who must serve customer demand by efficiently arranging their aircraft. A set-partitioning model is proposed to optimize the crew pairing and aircraft routing problem with minimum cost. The model takes into account multiple types of aircraft and FAA crew regulations. It is implemented with object-oriented programming and solved using CPLEX. In the model, a time window strategy is considered to allow flexible departure time during high demand day. The results show great improvement on cost savings over the company's original schedule. Especially, the flexible departure time emerges significant improvement on aircraft utilization and charter reduction. Moreover, the proposed methodology offers an efficient approach to evaluate business strategies, and provides valuable insight to help business decision-making