Research Of Aircraft Integrated Assignment

The flight planning is an important activity in airline daily operation management. Airlines have recognized that it is important to make good use of resources such as aircraft. Nowadays, mainly depending on handcraft and experience airline flight planning is less scientific and efficient which greatly affects the cost and revenue of airlines.Aircraft assignment is one of the most important stages. In order to improve airline flight planning optimization, this paper researches the aircraft assignment. First of all, the airline schedule planning process was introduced, as well as the content and rules of aircraft assignment in broad sense. A 0-1 integer programming model with the objective of minimizing costs was established, which considered the fleet assignment, aircraft routing and aircraft assignment simultaneously. And it included constraints on aircraft resources, flight connection, flight limitation and pre-assignment.Then the concept of constraint programming (CP) was introduced. Aircraft routes generating was considered as constraint satisfaction problem which could be solved by using ILOG. Aircraft assignment problems were large-scale optimization problems which could be adequately solved by column generation based on constraint programming. The main problem solved the set covering problem while the sub-problem is constraint satisfaction problem and generated columns dynamically. We designed effective constraint propagation algorithm and searched strategy to speed up the domain reductions.Finally, the entire algorithm was introduced and some instances were analyzed in detail to show the effectiveness of the model and the algorithm.