Assistant Professor

Assistant Professor

Singapore University of Technology and Design

Optimization of Aircraft Routing and Trajectory Planning for Airline Operations

Research Problem

Airline schedules contain hundreds or thousands of flight legs that must be assigned to feasible aircraft rotations. These rotations must respect aircraft availability, airport continuity, maintenance requirements, and other operational constraints.

In practice, airline planners must also balance several competing objectives. A routing plan that uses fewer aircraft may be less robust to delays, while additional schedule slack or aircraft-swapping opportunities may improve resilience but increase operating costs.

This creates a large-scale multi-objective decision problem in which airline managers need to evaluate not one optimal solution, but a range of operationally meaningful alternatives.

Contributions

Our research develops optimization-based decision-support methods for aircraft routing and airline operations, with an emphasis on generating and comparing alternative solutions efficiently.

Key contributions include:

  • Efficient data-processing methods for handling large airline schedule datasets
  • Mixed-integer linear programming models for constructing feasible aircraft rotations under operational and maintenance constraints
  • Multi-objective optimization using lexicographic goal programming and ε-constraint methods
  • Parallelized algorithms for generating Pareto-optimal routing solutions within practical computation times
  • Visualization and multi-criteria decision tools that allow airline planners to compare solutions according to robustness, aircraft utilization, re-timing, swapping opportunities, and other operational KPIs
  • Validation using historical AirAsia flight data

Selected Publications

International Collaborations

  • Tecnológico de Monterrey (Mexico)
    Collaboration with Francisco López-Ramos and Francisco Benita on multi-objective aircraft routing and airline decision-support systems.