The course scheduling problem at Lufthansa Technical Training

Lufthansa Technical Training GmbH (LTT) performs training courses for Lufthansa Technik AG as well as for several other international airlines. Courses of about 670 different types are offered of which several hundred take place each year. The course scheduling problem faced by LTT is to construct a yearly schedule which maximizes the profit margin incurred while meeting a variety of complex precedence, temporal, and resource-related constraints. A ‘good’ operational schedule should also meet a number of additional subordinate objectives. We formalize the problem and develop a heuristic scheme along with several priority rules, as well as a local search algorithm to determine well-suited weights for weighted composite rules. The operational planning situation of 1996 served as our major test instance; additional test instances were constructed by modifying this data. Several computational experiments were carried out to evaluate the performance of the algorithms. It turned out that the best so-found schedule is substantially better in terms of the profit margin incurred than the solution manually constructed by LTT.