Abstract

In the highly competitive airline industry, it is crucial for airlines to minimise operating costs and strengthen their competitiveness. Fuel costs constitute a substantial portion of airline operating costs and are directly related to airlines' profits. In this research, we support the airlines' fuel management by presenting a model that integrates aircraft routing and fuel tankering decisions. The effectiveness of fuel tankering can be enhanced by considering the aircraft routing decisions together, leading to a significant cost reduction for airlines. The integrated model is developed as a mixed-integer linear programming model. The symmetry-breaking methods and decomposition-based heuristic algorithm are also proposed to alleviate the computational burden. A set of computational results illustrates the significant cost-saving effects of the proposed model and the heuristic algorithm.