Integrated airline crew scheduling: A bi-dynamic constraint aggregation method using neighborhoods
نویسندگان
چکیده
The integrated crew scheduling (ICS) problem consists of determining, for a set of available crew members, least-cost schedules that cover all flights and respect various safety and collective agreement rules. A schedule is a sequence of pairings interspersed by rest periods that may contain days off. A pairing is a sequence of flights, connections, and rests starting and ending at the same crew base. Given its high complexity, the ICS problem has been traditionally tackled using a sequential two-stage approach, where a crew pairing problem is solved in the first stage and a crew assignment problem in the second stage. Recently, Saddoune et al. (2010) developed a model and a column generation/dynamic constraint aggregation method for solving the ICS problem in one stage. Their computational results showed that the integrated approach can yield significant savings in total cost and number of schedules, but requires much higher computational times than the sequential approach. In this paper, we enhance this method to obtain lower computational times. In fact, we develop a bi-dynamic constraint aggregation method that exploits a neighborhood structure when generating columns (schedules) in the column generation method. On a set of seven instances derived from real-world flight schedules, this method allows to reduce the computational times by an average factor of 2.3, while improving the quality of the computed solutions.
منابع مشابه
Cockpit Crew Pairing Problem in Airline Scheduling: Shortest Path with Resources Constraints Approach
Increasing competition in the air transport market has intensified active airlines’ efforts to keep their market share by attaching due importance to cost management aimed at reduced final prices. Crew costs are second only to fuel costs on the cost list of airline companies. So, this paper attempts to investigate the cockpit crew pairing problem. The set partitioning problem has been used for ...
متن کاملIntegrated airline scheduling
Airline scheduling is composed of fleet assignment, aircraft maintenance routing, and crew scheduling optimization subproblems. It is believed that the full optimization problem is computationally intractable, and hence the constituent subproblems are optimized sequentially so that the output of one is the input of the next. The sequential approach, however, provides an overall suboptimal solut...
متن کاملIntegrated Airline Fleet and Crew Robust Planning
The airline fleet assignment problem involves assigning aircrafts to flights to maximize profit. Different fleet assignment solutions cause dramatically different performance in subsequent crew planning and operational processes. We have developed an integrated fleet and crew robust planning method to provide fleet assignment solutions that are both friendly to crew planning and robust to real ...
متن کاملIntegrated Airline Operations: Schedule Design, Fleet Assignment, Aircraft Routing, and Crew Scheduling
متن کامل
Solving the Master Linear Program in Column Generation Algorithms for Airline Crew Scheduling using a Subgradient Method
A subgradient method for solving large linear programs is implemented and analyzed in a column generation framework. A performance comparison of the implementation is made versus the commercial linear programming solver XPress. Computational results from tests using data from airline crew scheduling, in particular crew rostering, show that the method performs very well in a column generation sc...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید
ثبت ناماگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید
ورودعنوان ژورنال:
- European Journal of Operational Research
دوره 212 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2011