A simulation scenario based mixed integer programming approach to airline reserve crew scheduling under uncertainty

Airlines operate in an uncertain environment for many reasons, for example due to the effects of weather, traffic or crew unavailability (due to delay or sickness). This work focuses on airline reserve crew scheduling under crew absence and journey time uncertainty for an airline operating a single hub and spoke network. Reserve crew can be used to cover absent crew or delayed connecting crew. A fixed number of reserve crew are available for scheduling and each requires a daily standby duty start time. Given an airline’s crew schedule and aircraft routings we propose a Mixed Integer Programming approach to scheduling the airline’s reserve crew. A simulation of the airline’s operations with stochastic journey time and crew absence inputs and without reserve crew is used to generate disruption scenarios for the MIPSSM formulation (Mixed Integer Programming Simulation Scenario Model). Each disruption scenario corresponds to a record of all of the disruptions in a simulation for which reserve crew use would have been beneficial. For each disruption in a disruption scenario there is a record of all reserve crew that could have been used to solve or reduce the disruption. This information forms the input to the MIPSSM formulation, which has the objective of finding the reserve schedule that minimises the overall level of disruption over a set of scenarios. Additionally, modifications of the MIPSSM are explored, and a heuristic solution approach and a reserve use policy derived from the MIPSSM are introduced. A heuristic based on the proposed Mixed Integer Programming Simulation Scenario Model or MIPSSM outperforms a range of alternative Christopher Bayliss · Geert De Maere · Jason Atkin ASAP, University of Nottingham, UK E-mail: cwb,gdm,[email protected] Marc Paelinck KLM Decision Support, Information services department KLM Royal Dutch Airlines KLM Headquarters, The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected] 10th International Conference of the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling PATAT 2014, 26-29 August 2014, York, United Kingdom