The objective of this internship is to develop a model-based decision support system for aircraft requirements. It is expected that the model base will be a 0-1 integer program that, when solved, will provide a daily set of routings for the aircraft. The primary objective of the model will be to minimize the number of routings (and therefore the number of aircraft) required to cover all of the flight legs. Much of the work for this project will involve extensive interaction with industrial planners in order to develop a good formulation for the model, and good interfaces with the system's users, existing databases, and other problem areas. In addition, as a result of the principal investigator's interests, special attention will be given to the multiobjective aspects of the problem; for example, it may be desirable to consider tradeoffs between the number of routes required to cover all of the flight legs, and the balancing of aircraft among the different airports. It is expected that this project will lead to the examination of other complex logistical problems. These problems include those related to flow planning, maintenance scheduling, crew scheduling, and the provisioning of spare parts for aircraft.
