A branch-and-price heuristic for the crew pairing problem with language constraints

Minimization of cost is very important in airline as great profit is an important objective for any airline system. One way to minimize the costs in airline is by developing an integrated planning process. Airline planning consists of many difficult operational decision problems including aircraft routing and crew pairing problems. These two sub-problems, though interrelated in practice, are usually solved sequentially leading to suboptimal solutions. We propose an integrated aircraft routing and crew pairing problem model, one approach to generate the feasible aircraft routes and crew pairs, followed by three approaches to solve the integrated model. The integrated aircraft routing and crew scheduling problem is to determine a minimum cost aircraft routes and crew schedules while each flight leg is covered by one aircraft and one crew. The first approach is an integer programming solution method, the second formulation is developed in a way to lend itself to be used efficiently by Dantzig Wolfe decomposition whereas the third one is formulated as a Benders decomposition method. Encouraging results are obtained when tested on four types of aircraft based on local flights in Malaysia for one week flight cycle.

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A Heuristic and Exact Method: Integrated Aircraft Routing and Crew Pairing Problem

Modern Applied Science ◽

10.5539/mas.v10n4p128 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 10 (4) ◽

pp. 128 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Nurul Farihan Mohamed ◽

Zaitul Marlizawati Zainuddin ◽

Said Salhi ◽

Nurul Huda Mohamed ◽

Nurul Akmal Mohamed

Keyword(s):

Heuristic Method ◽

Integrated Model ◽

Exact Method ◽

Routing Problem ◽

Aircraft Routing ◽

Suboptimal Solutions ◽

Constructive Heuristic ◽

Schedule Design ◽

Crew Pairing ◽

Pairing Problem

<p>In airline operations planning, there are four problems which are schedule design, fleet assignment, aircraft routing and crew pairing problem. Those problems are sequentially and interdependent. Aircraft routing and crew pairing problem are hard to solve and normally crew pairing problem dependent to the aircraft routing problem which gives the suboptimal solutions. As minimizing the costs is important in the airline system, so in order to tackle suboptimal solutions, aircraft routing problem and crew pairing problem are being integrated in one model. For solving the integrated model, the feasible aircraft routes and crew pairs are required. Because of that, a method is being proposed in this work for generating the feasible aircraft routes and crew pairs which is the constructive heuristic method. By using the generic aircraft routes and crew pairs, the integrated model then being solve by two approaches. The first approach is the exact method called the integer linear programming (ILP) while the second approach is from the heuristic method called particle swarm optimization. Encouraging results are encountered by testing on four types of aircrafts for one week flight cycle from local flights in Malaysia.</p>

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