Central East Pacific Flight Scheduling

This paper examines the implications of strategically scheduling flights on user-preferred routes in the Central East Pacific to reduce trajectory crossing points. After first casting the flight scheduling problem in terms of a job shop scheduling problem, a 0-1 integer programming model is used to calculate the optimal departure and en route controls required to generate feasible flight schedules. To enhance the solution, a ration-by-schedule based heuristic is introduced to transform the original model into a subset of problems. By varying attributes of the machines in the job shop scheduling formation, two distinct types of feasible schedules are obtained. The first type of schedules are highly restrictive yet but free of all four-dimensional trajectory crossing points, while the second type are less restrictive but may require limited tactical flight separation maneuvers to alleviate residual crossing points. The average adjusted time savings per flight varied between 1.8 minutes and 4.6 minutes per flight when allowing for both strategic flight scheduling and user-preferred flight routing.