An ASP Multi-Shot Encoding for the Aircraft Routing and Maintenance Planning Problem

The Aircraft Routing and Maintenance Planning problems are integral parts of the airline scheduling process. We study these relevant combinatorial optimization problems from the perspective of Answer Set Programming (ASP) modeling and solving. In particular, we contrast traditional single-shot ASP solving methods to a novel multi-shot solving approach, geared to rapidly discover
near-optimal solutions to sub-problems of increasing granularity. As it turns out, our multi-shot solving techniques can heavily speed up the optimization process without deteriorating the solution quality in comparison to single-shot solving.
We also provide a customizable instance generator and a solution viewer to facilitate intensive investigation of Aircraft Routing and Maintenance Planning as a benchmark problem. Our multi-shot solving techniques are however not limited to this benchmark alone, and the underlying ideas can be naturally applied to a
variety of scheduling problems.