Tactical and Operational Planning of Scheduled Maintenance for Per-Seat, On-Demand Air Transportation

Advances in aviation technology including the development of relatively cheap, very light jets and the possibility of free-flight have led to the realization of a per-seat, on-demand (PSOD) air transportation business that operates without a published flight schedule. In this business model, travelers call a few days in advance to request transportation by providing their origin airport, destination airport, an earliest departure time from the origin and a latest arrival time at the destination. An online scheduling algorithm quickly determines whether a request can be accommodated. However, the flight schedules for a given day are not finalized until the night before when itineraries (sets of consecutive flight legs to be flown by a single jet) are constructed to accommodate all accepted requests using an off-line scheduling algorithm ([6, 7]). Thus, on any given day only the itineraries for that day are known with certainty.