ABSTRACT
The main objective of this chapter is to describe and review airline optimization from an applied point of view. The airline industry was one of the first to apply operations research methods to commercial optimization problems. The combination of advancements in computer hardware and software technologies with clever mathematical algorithms and heuristics has dramatically transformed the ability of operations researchers to solve largescale, sophisticated airline optimization problems over the past 60 years. As an illustration, consider United Airlines’ eight fleet problem in Figure 20.1, which took nearly 9 h to solve in 1975 on an IBM System 370 running Mathematical Programming System Extended (MPSX), and only 18 s to solve in 2001 on an IBM Thinkpad running IBM’s Optimization Subroutine Library (OSL) V3. Better models and algorithms supported by faster hardware achieved more than four orders of magnitude improvement in solution time for this problem instance over the course of 26 years.
