A Heuristic and Exact Method: Integrated Aircraft Routing and Crew Pairing Problem

In airline operations planning, there are four problems which are schedule design, fleet assignment, aircraft routing and crew pairing problem. Those problems are sequentially and interdependent. Aircraft routing and crew pairing problem are hard to solve and normally crew pairing problem dependent to the aircraft routing problem which gives the suboptimal solutions. As minimizing the costs is important in the airline system, so in order to tackle suboptimal solutions, aircraft routing problem and crew pairing problem are being integrated in one model. For solving the integrated model, the feasible aircraft routes and crew pairs are required. Because of that, a method is being proposed in this work for generating the feasible aircraft routes and crew pairs which is the constructive heuristic method. By using the generic aircraft routes and crew pairs, the integrated model then being solve by two approaches. The first approach is the exact method called the integer linear programming (ILP) while the second approach is from the heuristic method called particle swarm optimization. Encouraging results are encountered by testing on four types of aircrafts for one week flight cycle from local flights in Malaysia.