Share from the GERAD Journals by Richard Hicks, Richard Madrid, Chris Milligan, Robert Pruneau, Mike Kanaley, Yvan Dumas, Benoit Lacroix, Jacques Desrosiers, and François Soumis The fractional aircraft market is the fastest growing segment of the business aircraft industry. A fractional aircraft operation is complex – essentially an unscheduled airline in a constantly changing environment. Bombardier Flexjet implemented a comprehensive three-module optimization system to simultaneously maximize its use of aircraft, crews, and facilities. AD OPT Technologies designed the modules, using the GENCOL optimizer developed at GERAD, which employs a column generation approach to decompose large-scale mixed-integer nonlinear programming problems. Since inception, the project has generated savings in excess of $54M with projected additional savings of $27M annually, primarily by substantially lowering crew levels (20 percent), aircraft inventory (40 percent), and supplemental charter aircraft usage (5 percent) while increasing aircraft utilization (10 percent). The quality of customer service has remained consistently high, with significant reduction in supply. Read More