Aircraft Scheduling Based on Constraint Programming

Aircraft scheduling is an important step in air transport planning and has a crucial impact on the regular operation and overall effectiveness of Airlines.Aircraft scheduling problem is usually described as a large-scale integer programming problem and is also an important part in airline operation research.The model is a serious degradation NP-hard problem.This paper develops a multi-type aircraft scheduling model and proposes a dynamic column generation algorithm based on constraint programming to effectively solve the problem.It fast generates flight strings by constraint programming and calculates the reduced cost of each strings,dynamically selects column sets and iterates with the restriction master problem.Finally,field data from one airline's trunk flight network in China are used to test and verify the effectiveness of the model and algorithm,and the results show that the integrated model is more optimized than practical operation.