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Integrated airline aircraft routing and crew pairing by alternating Lagrangian decomposition

Author

Listed:
  • Cong Li

    (University of Chinese Academy of Sciences)

  • Suixiang Gao

    (University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
    Zhongguancun Laboratory)

  • Wenguo Yang

    (University of Chinese Academy of Sciences)

  • Zhipeng Jiang

    (University of Chinese Academy of Sciences)

Abstract

For the aircraft routing and crew pairing problems, a sequential approach is usually used to solve they. When solving the crew pairing problem, the impact of aircraft routing problem is often neglected so that these two problems are independent. This approach reduces the complexity of the solution process, but it may obtain a suboptimal solution. In this paper, we consider an integrated aircraft routing and crew pairing problem. We propose an integrated model that integrates the aircraft routing and crew pairing problems. We propose a solution algorithm based on a heuristic alternating Lagrangian decomposition to address coupling constraint of the integrated model. The solution algorithm iterates between the first Lagrangian subproblem about aircraft routing and the second Lagrangian subproblem about crew pairing. These two Lagrangian subproblems are solved by a branch-and-price algorithm. In the branch-and-price algorithm, we present a heuristic branching strategy. The computational experiments are conducted on several real-world data sets.

Suggested Citation

  • Cong Li & Suixiang Gao & Wenguo Yang & Zhipeng Jiang, 2025. "Integrated airline aircraft routing and crew pairing by alternating Lagrangian decomposition," Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, Springer, vol. 49(5), pages 1-15, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:jcomop:v:49:y:2025:i:5:d:10.1007_s10878-025-01324-0
    DOI: 10.1007/s10878-025-01324-0
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    References listed on IDEAS

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