A: This paper discusses a modeling approach to robust crew pairing when a set of extra flights is likely to be added to the regular flight schedule. The set of these possible extra flights is known at the planning stage. We demonstrate that these extra flights may be incorporated into the schedule if necessary by modifying the planned crew pairings appropriately and without delaying or c...

The airline industry has a long history of developing and applying optimization approaches to their myriad of scheduling problems, including designing flight schedules that maximize profitability while satisfying rules related to aircraft maintenance; generating cost-minimizing, feasible work schedules for pilots and flight attendants; and identifying implementable, lowcost changes to aircraft ...

We present an algorithm for the crew pairing problem, an optimization problem that is part of the airline crew scheduling procedure. A pairing is a round trip starting and ending at the home base, which is susceptible to constraints that arise due to laws and regulations. The purpose of the crew pairing problem is to generate a set of pairings with minimal cost, covering all flight legs that th...

The crew scheduling problem in the airline industry is extensively investigated in the operations research literature since efficient crew employment can drastically reduce operational costs of airline companies. Given the flight schedule of an airline company, crew scheduling is the process of assigning all necessary crew members in such a way that the airline is able to operate all its flight...

The airline crew pairing problem (CPP) is one of the classical problems in airline operations research due to its crucial impact on the cost structure of an airline. Moreover, the complex crew regulations and the large scale of the resulting mathematical programming models have rendered it an academically interesting problem over decades. The CPP is a tactical problem, typically solved over a m...

In a previous article (Chute & Wiener, 1995), we explored the coordination between the "two cultures" in an airliner's crew: cockpit and cabin. In this article, we discuss a particular problem: the dilemma facing the cabin crew when they feel that they have safety-critical information and must decide whether to take it to the cockpit. We explore the reasons for the reluctance of the flight atte...

F reasons of tractability, the airline scheduling problem has traditionally been sequentially decomposed into various stages (e.g., schedule generation, fleet assignment, aircraft routing, and crew pairing), with the decisions from one stage imposed upon the decision making process in subsequent stages. Although this approach greatly simplifies the solution process, it unfortunately fails to ca...