ABSTRACT
Flight scheduling is the starting point for all other airline planning and operations (Barnhart 2008, Yu and Thengvall 2002). The flight schedule is a timetable consisting of what cities to fly to and at what times. An airline’s decision to offer certain flights will mainly depend on market demand forecasts, available aircraft operating characteristics, available manpower, regulations, and the behavior of competing airlines. The number of airports and flight frequencies served by an airline usually expresses and measures the physical size of the airline network (Janic 2000). For large air carriers, the flight-scheduling group and route development may contain more than 30 employees (Kuzminski 1999).
