Rotation Planning for the Continental Service of a European Airline

We consider a version of the aircraft rotation problem where the objective is to minimize delay risks. Given a set of flights to be flown by a subfleet the rotation problem is to find a specific route for each aircraft of the subfleet such that each flight is flown by exactly one aircraft. Additionally, the sequence of flights defining a route must satisfy certain requirements mainly to avoid delays. We present a mathematical model for the problem of minimizing the delay risk according to special requirements of a major airline. An efficient Lagrangian heuristic is proposed that uses subgradient optimization and linear assignments as subproblems. Computational results on real data are given and compared to actual aircraft rotations of that airline.