Optimizing Flight Schedules by an Automated Decision Support System

In current air forces, due to different types of aircrafts and missions, lots of flight schedules are published every day. All flying units make their flight schedules each of which contain decisions of the best pilot-mission-aircraft triplet according to unit’s own constraints and rules. In this study, main objective is to build a decision support system to assist the schedulers in fighter squadrons. Scheduling in fighter squadrons are complex and time consuming due to the combination of the large number of constraints and limited number of schedulers. Also, dynamic environment of the operation area that increases uncertainty level of the problem makes flight scheduling a difficult job. For this reason, building flight schedules without any supplementary tools takes a large amount of time. Thus, air forces are in need of automated decision support systems for flight scheduling. The required Decision Support System is coded in Microsoft Excel Visual Basic to produce flight schedules which are now made manually. To generate feasible schedules, Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedures is implemented and generated schedules are scored to attain best solution. Following that, performance of DSS and scoring method are evaluated to analyze solution technique