A crew scheduling algorithms widely used in practice assume no disruptions. Because disruptions often occur, the actual cost of the resulting crew schedules is often greater. We consider algorithms for finding crew schedules that perform well in practice. The deterministic crew scheduling model is an approximation of crew scheduling under uncertainty with the assumption that all pairings will o...

The airline industry is faced with some of the largest scheduling problems of any industry. The crew scheduling problem involves the optimal allocation of crews to flights. Over the last two decades the magnitude and complexity of crew scheduling problems have grown enormously and airlines are relying more on automated mathematical procedures as a practical necessity. In this paper we survey di...

Crew scheduling can be defined as the problem of assigning a group of workers (a crew) to a set of tasks. The crews are typically interchangeable , although in some cases different crews possess different characteristics that affect which subsets of tasks they can complete. Crew scheduling problems appear in a number of transportation contexts. Examples include bus and rail transit, truck and r...

Traditional methods model the billion-dollar airline crew scheduling problem as deterministic and do not explicitly include information on potential disruptions. Unfortunately, the effort used to optimize crew schedules and reduce crew costs is often wasted as flight schedules are often disrupted. Consequently, airlines spend a great deal of time and money optimizing crew schedules in the plann...

We present our solution to the crew-scheduling problem for North American railroads. (Crew scheduling in North America is very different from scheduling in Europe, where it has been well studied.) The crew-scheduling problem is to assign operators to scheduled trains over a time horizon at minimal cost while honoring operational and contractual requirements. Currently, decisions related to crew...

This paper presents a new multi-depot combined vehicle and crew scheduling algorithm, and uses it, in conjunction with a heuristic vehicle routing algorithm, to solve the intra-city mail distribution problem faced by Australia Post. First we describe the Australia Post mail distribution problem and outline the heuristic vehicle routing algorithm used to find vehicle routes. We present a new mul...

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...

This paper proposes a heuristic solution approach for solving multipledepot integrated vehicle and crew scheduling problem. The basic idea of the method is to first solve independent vehicle and crew scheduling problems separately, and then identify sequences of trips presented in both solutions. Afterwards, the model size is reduced by fixing such sequences before solving the actual multiple-d...

Crew scheduling is an important production planning of airlines. Being optimized crew scheduling could make full use of human resources, and reduce operating costs. The traditional airline crew scheduling model is deterministic and does not include potential disruptions due to weather, air traffic control, etc. To take into account of effects of random factors such as weather, air traffic contr...