This work addresses the challenges of airline planning, which requires the integration of flight scheduling, aircraft availability, and maintenance to ensure both airworthiness and profitability. Current solutions, often developed by human experts, are susceptible to bias and may yield suboptimal results due to the inherent complexity of the problem. Furthermore, existing state-of-the-art approaches often inadequately address critical factors, such as maintenance, variable flight numbers, discrete time slots, and potential flight repetition. This paper presents a novel approach to aircraft routing optimization using a model that incorporates critical constraints, including path connectivity, flight duration, maintenance requirements, turnaround times, and closed routes. The proposed solution employs a simulated annealing algorithm enhanced with specialized perturbation operators and constraint-handling techniques. The main contributions are twofold: the development of an optimization model tailored to small airlines and the design of operators capable of efficiently solving large-scale, realistic scenarios. The method is validated using established benchmarks from the literature and a real case study from a Mexican commercial airline, demonstrating its ability to generate feasible and competitive routing configurations.
Díaz-Molina et al. (Tue,) studied this question.