A dynamic approach for aircraft assignment and maintenance scheduling by airlines

The problems of assigning planes to flights and of fleet maintenance operations scheduling are considered in this paper. While recent approaches make use of artificial intelligence techniques running on main frame computers to solve combinatorial optimization problems for nominal operations, a dynamic approach is proposed here to face on-line operation conditions. The proposed solution mixes a Dynamic Programming approach (to cope with the fleet assignment problem) and a heuristic technique (to solve the embedded maintenance schedule problem). When applied to a medium charter airline, this approach shows acceptability characteristics for operational staffs, while providing efficient solutions. The proposed solution scheme can be considered as the basis for the development of an on-line decision support system for fleet operations management within airlines.