Crew Assignment by Constraint Logic Programming

In this paper, we deal with the crew assignment problem, which is a subproblem of the airline crew scheduling problem. The aim of the crew assignment problem is the optimal allocation of a given set of crew pairings to crew members, in a way that a set of constraints is satis ed. The optimality criterion we employ in this work requires the ight time fair distribution among all crew members. This problem has been traditionally tackled with Operations Research techniques. In recent years, the Constraint Logic Programming paradigm has been successfully used for solving hard combinatorial optimization problems. We propose a formulation of the crew assignment problem as a constraint satisfaction problem and we use a branch-and-bound technique combined with some heuristics in order to nd quickly a solution identical, or at least very close, to the optimal.