Airline base schedule optimisation by flight network annealing

A system for rigorous airline base schedule optimisation is described. The architecture of the system reflects the underlying problem structure. The architecture is hierarchical consisting of a master problem for logical aircraft schedule optimisation and a sub-problem for schedule evaluation. The sub-problem is made up of a number of component sub-problems including connection generation, passenger choice modelling, passenger traffic allocation by simulation and revenue and cost determination. Schedule optimisation is carried out by means of simulated annealing of flight networks. The operators for the simulated annealing process are feasibility preserving and form a complete set of operators.