We address an integrated airline scheduling problem that combines three airline planning processes: fleet assignment, aircraft routing, and crew pairing. For a given daily flight schedule, the problem requires simultaneously assigning aircraft and crews to each scheduled flight, taking into account aircraft maintenance restrictions and crew work rules. We propose to solve this complex problem of integrated flight planning while taking into account robustness considerations. In this regard, robustness is achieved by restricting tight connections in the schedule and increasing the number of connections where crews follow the aircraft. We formulate the problem using a very large-scale, yet compact, mixed-integer programming model, and we propose a matheuristic consisting of a decomposition approach and a proximity search algorithm. Computational experiments carried out on real instances from a major airline and having up to 14,014 itineraries, 646 flights, and 202 aircraft provide evidence of the proposed approach’s efficacy. In particular, we find that the average deviation from a conservative bound is at most equal to 0.6%.

我们解决了一个综合航空公司调度问题，该问题结合了三个航空公司规划流程：机队分配、飞机路线安排和机组人员配对。对于给定的每日航班时刻表，该问题需要同时为每个预定航班分配飞机和机组人员，同时考虑飞机维护限制和机组人员工作规则。我们建议在考虑稳健性的同时解决综合飞行计划的这个复杂问题。在这方面，通过限制时间表中的紧密连接并增加机组人员跟随飞机的连接数量来实现稳健性。我们使用非常大规模但紧凑的混合整数编程模型来制定问题，并且我们提出了一种由分解方法和邻近搜索算法组成的数学方法。在一家主要航空公司的真实实例上进行的计算实验，拥有多达 14,014 条行程、646 次航班和 202 架飞机，提供了所提议方法有效性的证据。特别是，我们发现与保守界限的平均偏差最多等于 0.6%。