Robust Airline Crew Pairing: Move-up Crews

This article presents a model and a solution methodology that produces robust crew schedules in planning. The authors note that primarily due to irregular operations, the actual crew cost at the end of a month is typically substantially higher than the costs projected in planning. Besides the objective of minimizing the crew cost, the authors introduce the objective of maximizing the number of move-up crews, i.e., the crews that can potentially be swapped in operations. The authors use a combination of delayed column generation and Lagrangian relaxation to solve the resulting large-scale integer program. The article includes computational experiments that demonstrate the benefits of using the robust crew schedule instead of the traditional one. Various crew schedules are evaluated by generating random disruptions and then running a crew recovery module. Other factors considered include uncovered legs, reserved crews, and deadheading. The authors conclude that robustness leads to reduced operational crew cost. They caution, however, that in planning, the trade-off between the inflated direct crew cost and robustness needs to be exploited carefully.

  • Availability:
  • Authors:
    • Shebalov, Sergey
    • Klabjan, Diego
  • Publication Date: 2006-8

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Print
  • Features: Figures; References; Tables;
  • Pagination: pp 300-312
  • Serial:

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01037315
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Files: TRIS
  • Created Date: Nov 28 2006 11:31AM