A New Model for Fleet Assignment Problem, Case Study of Iran Air Network at Vision 2036

Abstract

The fleet assignment problem (FAP) assigns the type of airplane at each flight segment. Since airplane is an expensive resource, poor fleet assignment can cause a great increase in costs of airlines. There are so many consideration which should be tackled in formulation of a FAP problem, especially the parameters regarding to the airplanes. This paper presents a novel, mixed integer programing for formulation of FAP problem. The aim of this paper is to assign most appropriate fleet type to flight while minimizing the cost and determining optimal number of plane for each fleet. The model guarantees that each pair of nodes is served in a limit of planes utilization time constraint. The model was applied in a real example. In this example the demand matrix between 69 airports in Iran was estimated for year 2036. Finally, the most appropriate fleet was determined in the outlook 2036. The results show that the airplane assignment by the proposed model will need less purchasing cost comparing to current fleet needs and total investment cost in air industry will be decreased so much.