Fleet planning under demand and fuel price uncertainty using actor–critic reinforcement learning

Current state-of-the-art airline planning models face computational limitations, restricting the operational applicability to problems of representative sizes. This is particularly the case when considering the uncertainty necessarily associated with the long-term plan of an aircraft fleet. Considering the growing interest in the application of machine learning techniques to operations research problems, this article investigates the applicability of these techniques for airline planning. Specifically, an Advantage Actor–Critic (A2C) reinforcement learning algorithm is developed for the airline fleet planning problem. The increased computational efficiency of using an A2C agent allows us to consider real-world-sized problems and account for highly-volatile uncertainty in demand and fuel price. The result is a multi-stage probabilistic fleet plan describing the evolution of the fleet according to a large set of future scenarios. The A2C algorithm is found to outperform a deterministic model and a deep Q-network algorithm. The relative performance of the A2C increases as more complexity is added to the problem. Further, the A2C algorithm can compute a multi-stage fleet planning solution within a few seconds.