Tail-Number-Assignment Problem of Airliners Based on Fleet Balance Application

To solve airliner tail-number-assignment (TNA) problem with the requirement of balanced application of airplanes, a simulated annealing algorithmwas designed. According to the character of single hub and spoke network widely used in Chinese airliners, a new concept called flight pairing was defined. When sufficient aircrafts are available, constraint on application of each aircraft is ignored. By constructing a flight pairnetworkmodel describingthe connectingrelationship of flight pairs, the originalTNAproblem is transformed to optimizing flight pair schemes with minimized target function. A simulated annealing algorithmwas presented. The computing complexity of this algorithm isO(M(m3+mn)).