Aircraft Scheduling with Maintenance and Crew Consideration

In this paper, we propose an integrated approach to combine aircraft routing and crew scheduling problem with the consideration of multiple types of fleets where a crew can only fly the specific type of fleet. This method effectively manages the aircraft and crew because it takes aircraft maintenance into account. A rolling horizon technique is used to capture the uncertainty of demand. The qualitative analysis indicates that unscheduled maintenance posts big impacts on the schedule and results in high operation cost. Special routing and scheduling strategy is provided to reduce the impact from unscheduled maintenance to improve aircraft safety and utilization. The computational results on the real data show that significant benefit can be obtained from the proposed strategy