This project aims to discover computationally practical methods for finding near-optimal solutions to two of the important resource allocation problems faced by an airline: crew planning and fleet assignment. Crew planning involves finding the minimum cost set of crew round-trips, each beginning and ending at a crew base, that insures exactly one crew on each flight leg that must be flown. Fleet assignment invilves finding the minimum cost assignment of the available aircraft, which are of several different types, to the flight legs that must be flown. The main technical challenge to be tackled will be that of finding integer solutions to models for which the linear program must be solved by column generation. Success with these two problems would also be easily transferable to similar models in other industries.
