An Abductive-based Scheduler for Air-Crew Assignment

This paper presents the design and implementation of an air-crew assignment system for producing and refining a solution to this problem based on the Artificial Intelligence principles and techniques of abductive reasoning as captured by the framework of Abductive Logic Programming (ALP). The system offers a high-level of flexibility in addressing both the tasks of crew scheduling and rescheduling. It can be used to generate a valid and good quality initial solution and then to help the human operators adjust and refine further this solution in order to meet extra requirements of the problem. These additional needs can arise either due to new foreseen requirements that the company wants to have or experiment with for a particular period in time or due to unexpected events that have occurred while the solution (crew-roster) is in operation. Our work shows the ability and flexibility of abduction, and more specifically of ALP, in tackling problems of this type with complex and changing requirements.