The purpose of this paper is twofold: first to carry out a comprehensive literature review for state of the art regarding airline schedule planning and second to identify some new research directions that might help academic researchers and practitioners,The authors mainly focus on the research work appeared in the last three decades The search process was conducted in database searches using four keywords: “Flight scheduling,” “Fleet assignment,” “Aircraft maintenance routing” (AMR), and “Crew scheduling” Moreover, the combination of the keywords was used to find the integrated models Any duplications due to database variety and the articles that were written in non-English language were discarded,The authors studied 106 research papers and categorized them into five categories In addition, according to the model features, subcategories were further identified Moreover, after discussing up-to-date research work, the authors suggested some future directions in order to contribute to the existing literature,The presented categories and subcategories were based on the model characteristics rather than the model formulation and solution methodology that are commonly used in the literature One advantage of this classification is that it might help scholars to deeply understand the main variation between the models On the other hand, identifying future research opportunities should help academic researchers and practitioners to develop new models and improve the performance of the existing models,This study proposed some considerations in order to enhance the efficiency of the schedule planning process practically, for example, using the dynamic Stackelberg game strategy for market competition in flight scheduling, considering re-fleeting mechanism under heterogeneous fleet for fleet assignment, and considering the stochastic departure and arrival times for AMR,In the literature, all the review papers focused only on one category of the five categories Then, this category was classified according to the model formulation and solution methodology However, in this work, the authors attempted to propose a comprehensive review for all categories for the first time and develop new classifications for each category The proposed classifications are hence novel and significant

Airline schedule planning: a review and future directions

A robust mathematical model and heuristic algorithms for integrated aircraft routing and scheduling, with consideration of fleet assignment problem

A pair-based task scheduling algorithm for cloud computing environment

Scheduling strategies are important to improve network efficiency and optimize time slots for both high-speed train (HST) and air travel. Although many scholars have studied HST and air travel competition from the perspectives of the spatial patterns and travel costs of the two transportation modes, few studies have investigated their potential temporal competition. To fill this research gap, this paper uses a time window method to examine the relationship between HSTs and flights operating between city-pairs. From the perspective of departure time, an analysis was conducted in the overlapping network of HSTs and flights at the city-pair level in China, based on one-day schedules. The results show that (1) HSTs and flights were temporally scheduled differently according to their within-day dynamics, and (2) HSTs and flights experienced fierce competition from 7 am to 9 am on average. Furthermore, the proposed classification method identifies city-pairs in a single-mode dominant market, full competition market, partial competition market, and complementary coordination market. Spatially, 24 city-pairs operating 343 flights with 533 train competitors in one day formed the full competition market with high-frequency schedules, including such city-pairs as Beijing-Shanghai, Guangzhou-Shanghai, and Shanghai-Xi’an. The method to classify city-pairs according to the similarity and diversity of HST and flight schedules may be generalized for allocating time slots for two modes. This work may help to schedule HSTs and flights in future transportation management.

Zhang Dong

Papers

An integrated flight scheduling and fleet assignment method based on a discrete choice model