Summary, Conclusions, and Future Work

Abstract

In this study, two airline scheduling approaches were developed that integrate the flight schedule generation and aircraft scheduling phase into a single scheduling approach. One of the two approaches for airline schedule optimization follows the traditional planning paradigm of iteratively and sequentially solving subproblems of the overall airline scheduling problem. The other airline scheduling approach is based on self-adaptive metaheuristic optimization in which complete airline schedules are processed at once. Applying both approaches to the same scenarios results in the simultaneous approach being the more efficient planning technique. The capability of the simultaneous approach is further demonstrated by verifying its results for systematically modified planning scenarios. The simultaneous planning approach of this study optimizes a large portion of the overall airline scheduling problem in an integrated procedure while minimizing simplifying assumptions. Thus, many of the requirements formulated in airline operations research literature are fulfilled. However, further challenges exist that future work should focus on: incorporating the complete crew planning into this scheduling approach, including stochastic elements in the schedule evaluation to minimize the effects of disruptions, further increasing the level of detail in which airline operations are represented and considerung more practical requirements, and finally – since this study represents a theoretic framework – assessing the applicability of the integrated approach in real-world airline scheduling.