Heuristic algorithms for assigning and scheduling flight missions in a military aviation unit

We consider an operations planning problem in a military aviation unit that performs a number of flight missions with multiple identical aircrafts. The problem is to assign the flight missions to the aircrafts and to schedule these assigned missions on each aircraft. Sequence-dependent setup times are required between the missions, and multiple aircrafts may be needed for a mission, but the aircrafts assigned to the same mission should start the mission simultaneously. We develop heuristic algorithms for the problem with the objective of minimizing makespan, i.e., the time by which all the missions have been completed. For evaluation of the performance of the algorithms, a series of computational tests was performed on a number of problem instances, and results show that the proposed algorithms give good or near optimal solutions in a reasonable amount of time.