Department of
Applied
Mathematics

Robust tail assignment

Ivan Dovica

Abstract

The tail assignment problem is one of the classical planning problems in the operation of an airline. It deals with the construction of rotations for individual units of aircraft in order to cover the legs of a flight schedule. We propose an efficient column generation method to minimize the probability of delay propagations along aircraft rotations. In this way, delay resistant schedules can be constructed. Computational results for large-scale real-world problems demonstrate substantial punctuality improvements. The method can be generalized to crew and integrated scheduling problems.