Prescriptive Analytics for Swapping Aircraft Assignments at All Nippon Airways

In airlines operations, fleet assignment models are used to assign flight legs to different equipment types (such as Boeing 760 or 767 or AirBus 320). The fleet assignments have to satisfy certain operational constraints, such as coverage, maximum overnight stays, and airport compatibility. Fleet assignments are tactical decisions, and changes in demand and maintenance requirements require an intermediate decision-making process to capture these changes before a flight’s day of departure. In this paper, we describe an implementation of a swapper optimization suite (SOS) for one of the largest airlines in Japan. The scale of the flight legs, the equipment types, complex operational constraints, maintenance requirements, and other complex criteria specified by the route planners necessitated the development of a sophisticated optimization suite to generate swaps of flight legs among the different equipment types for the allotted fleet assignments. The SOS uses optimization models to generate the optimal swaps. The company has seamlessly integrated the SOS in its information systems to incorporate optimization into the decision-making process.