Fleet Assignment Model for an Airline

The project Fleet Assignment of a Small Airline is an effort to understand the vitality and viability of the field of operations research not only to the airline industry but also to the daily life problems that engineering managers face almost everyday in performing their professional obligations Assigning airplanes to scheduled flight segments is one of the most important decisions affecting airline profitability in the schedule development process. Owing to the complexity, schedulers may focus on individual flight segments and loose sight of system profitability. The fleet assignment model provides airlines with both strategic and tactical analysis support to develop profitable and operationally feasible schedules. Combining such model with other tools like Crystal Ball and OptQuest enable Fleet Operations Managers to utilize resources in the best possible ways thus enhancing the profitability of the airline. The Fleet Assignment Model presented in this paper may have many limitations which should be understandable for the very reason that the focus of the developers of this model was to gain as much insight into the utility of operations research. Presenting the model as \u27the solution\u27 would be gross injustice to those who have made life long contributions to the body of knowledge in this specific area. Nevertheless, going by the results of the model, it would not be unfair to state that the first step taken is in the right direction. Taking this model as a skeleton to build upon would not be fruitless to say the least