Application of a Hybrid Genetic Algorithm

Scope and Purpose|Airline crew scheduling is a very visible and economically signiicant problem. Because of its widespread use, economic signiicance, and diiculty of solution, the problem has attracted the attention of the operations research community for over twenty-ve years. The purpose of this paper was to develop a genetic algorithm for the airline crew scheduling problem, and to compare it with traditional approaches. Abstract|This paper discusses the development and application of a hybrid genetic algorithm to airline crew scheduling problems. The hybrid algorithm consists of a steady-state genetic algorithm and a local search heuristic. The hybrid algorithm was tested on a set of forty real-world problems. It found the optimal solution for half the problems, and good solutions for nine others. The results were compared to those obtained with branch-and-cut and branch-and-bound algorithms. The branch-and-cut algorithm was signiicantly more successful than the hybrid algorithm, and the branch-and-bound algorithm slightly better.