Title
From State-of-the-Art Static Fleet Assignment to Flexible Stochastic Planning of the Future
Abstract
Given a flight schedule, which is a set of non-stop flights, called legs, with specified departure and arrival times, and a set of aircraft types, called subfleets, the fleet assignment problem is to determine which aircraft type should fly each leg. The objective is to maximize the overall profit. Usually, planners assume that precise input data are determininstically available at planning time. As a consequence, an important insufficiency of modern industrial plans, especially flight-plans, is their lack of robustness. Disruptions prevent from operating as planned before and induce high costs for trouble shooting. One reason for the uncertainties in the data for fleet assignment is that this problem is part of a long row of optimization problems of an airline. Therefore, important restrictions of later steps like connection dependent ground times should be considered in the fleet assignment problem. We show how connection dependent ground times can be added to the fleet assignment problem and presents three optimization methods, varying in run time and solution quality, that can solve real-world problem instances with more than 6000 legs within minutes. Moreover, real or believed non-determinism leads to inevitable uncertainties in input data. As a consequence, instead of a traditional plan, a flexible strategy which reacts on different relizations of the uncertain data is demanded. The Repair Game is a formalization of a planning task, and playing it performs disruption management and generates robust plans with the help of game tree search. We introduce the game and present experimental results of a feasibility study.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1007/978-3-642-02094-0_8
Algorithmics of Large and Complex Networks
Keywords
Field
DocType
fleet assignment problem,input data,fleet assignment,uncertain data,real-world problem instance,state-of-the-art static fleet assignment,aircraft type,optimization problem,arrival time,connection dependent ground time,flexible stochastic planning,precise input data,feasibility study,profitability,assignment problem
Weapon target assignment problem,Mathematical optimization,Quadratic assignment problem,Generalized assignment problem,Uncertain data,Robustness (computer science),Assignment problem,Engineering,Game tree,Optimization problem
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
5515
0302-9743
3
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.43
17
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sven Grothklags182.64
ulf lorenz27619.36
Burkhard Monien32199279.35