Abstract
A typical problem related to airline crew management consists of optimally assigning the required crew members to planned flights for a given period of time, while complying with a variety of labor regulations, safety rules and policies of the airline. This problem, called crew assignment problem (CAP), is of the NPHard class. So, it is usually divided into two independent subproblems, crew pairing problem (CPP) and crew rostering problem (CRP), modeled and solved sequentially. This division does not provide a global treatment to the CAP in terms of total cost and quality of the final solution. The state of the art involves the integrated solution of CAP, with both subproblems (CPP and CRP) solved simultaneously. It still requires high computational effort. Its combinatorial nature makes it difficult (or even impossible) to be solved by exact methods. The methodology proposed in this research provides an integrated solution of the CAP with heuristic procedures. The methodology was tested to solve instances related to small and medium-sized Brazilian airlines. The results were also compared with those obtained through an exact model adapted from the literature.
Highlights
This paper presents the main results of a research addressed to solve the crew assignment problem (CAP) with a proposed heuristic procedure
Where ! is the total cost of solution ?; / # is the cost of assigning crew member to duty period ; $ # takes value 1 if crew member is assigned to duty period and zero otherwise;, is the cost of flight credit exceeding the minimum guarantee of crew member; -./ is the number of extra flight credits of crew member ; 12 is the penalty associated with non-coverage of flight i; 32 is the number of crew members that are needed to satisfy the crew requirements of flight ; 62 is the penalty associated with over-coverage of flight ; -2 is the number of extra
The mean deviation of flight credits assigned to the crew members is computed by -J -3 J = ∑ ∈ K./ − .LL/LK/| |, where ./ is the number of flight credits assigned to crew member and .LL/L = ∑ ∈ ./ /| | is the mean of flight credits assigned to crew members
Summary
This paper presents the main results of a research addressed to solve the crew assignment problem (CAP) with a proposed heuristic procedure. The importance of this type of approach is given by the combinatorial nature of the problem, which turns it impossible to be solved through exact models for large instances. Zeghal and Minoux (2006), Souai and Teghem (2009), and Gomes and Gualda (2010) proposed integrated strategies in which the rosters of the crew members are formed from grouping the duty periods (instead of the pairings) with other activities, such.
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