Per-Seat, On-Demand Air Transportation Part II: Parallel Local Search

The availability of relatively cheap small jet aircrafts suggests a new air transportation business: dial-a-flight, an on-demand service in which travelers call a few days in advance to schedule transportation. A successful on-demand air transportation service requires an effective scheduling system to construct minimum cost pilot and jet itineraries for a set of accepted transportation requests. In Part I, we introduced an integer multi-commodity network flow model with side constraints for the dial-a-flight problem and showed that small instances can be solved effectively. Here, we demonstrate that high-quality solutions for large-scale real-life instances can be produced efficiently by embedding the core optimization technology in a local search scheme. To achieve the desired level of performance, metrics were devised to select neighborhoods intelligently, a variety of search diversification techniques were included, and an asynchronous parallel implementation was developed.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TRANSCI
• Authors: Daniel G. Espinoza, R. Garcia, Marcos Goycoolea, George L. Nemhauser, Martin W. P. Savelsbergh
• Keywords: Air Transportation, On-demand Air Transportation, Small Jet Aircrafts, TRANSCI 2008