The integrated aircraft routing problem with optional flights and delay considerations

In this paper, we integrate flight scheduling, fleet assignment, and aircraft routing decisions, which are the most prominent decisions in airline planning, while considering the stochasticity of the demand. In addition, optional flights, delays and deadhead flights are considered as they are crucial elements that significantly affect airline profits. Due to the complexity of the formulated problem, three different column generation-based algorithms are developed. The results show that our algorithms can solve the problem in a fraction of the time a commercial solver takes with an optimality gap of less than 0.1%.