Maintenance and Crew Considerations in Fleet Assignment

Given a flight schedule, which is a set of flight segments with specified departure and arrival times, and a set of aircraft, the fleet assignment problem is to determine which aircraft type should fly each flight segment. The objective is to maximize revenue minus operating costs. In the basic fleet assignment problem considered by Hane et al. (Hane, C. A., C. Barnhart, E. L. Johnson, R. E. Marsten, G. L. Nemhauser, G. Sigismondi. 1995. The fleet assignment problem: Solving a large-scale integer program. Math. Programming70 211–232.) a daily, domestic fleet assignment problem is modeled and solved with up to eleven fleets and 2,500 flight legs. This paper provides modeling devices for including maintenance and crew considerations into the basic model while retaining its solvability.