Itinerary-Based Airline Fleet Assignment

We consider the airline fleet assignment problem involving the profit maximizing assignment of aircraft types to flight legs. Although several basic formulations have been proposed, important network considerations are insufficiently treated in these formulations and the resulting solutions are often suboptimal. We propose a new formulation and solution approach that captures network effects and generates superior solutions. We quantify the benefits of our proposed approach in a case study using data from a major United States airline.