Airline cockpit crew scheduling

Abstract

Essential to airline operations, cockpit crew scheduling has not been researched much in the past. In this research we developed a model and two scheduling networks, using real data from a Taiwan airline, to help minimize cockpit crew costs and to plan for proper cockpit crew pairings. The model was formulated as a set-partitioning problem. A column generation approach was proposed to efficiently solve the problem. To show how well the model could be applied to the real world, a case study regarding the international operations of a Taiwan airline was performed.