Exact approaches for integrated aircraft fleeting and routing at TunisAir

Abstract

We describe models and exact solutions approaches for an integrated aircraft fleeting and routing problem arising at TunisAir. Given a schedule of flights to be flown, the problem consists of determining a minimum cost route assignment for each aircraft so as to cover each flight by exactly one aircraft while satisfying maintenanceactivity constraints. We investigate two tailored approaches for this problem: Benders decomposition and branch-and-price. Computational experiments conducted on real-data provide evidence that the branch-and-price approach outperforms the Benders decomposition approach and delivers optimal solutions within moderate CPUtimes. On the other hand, the Benders algorithm yields very quickly high quality near-optimal solutions.