Title
Aircrew pairings with possible repetitions of the same flight number
Abstract
A crew pairing is a sequence of flights, connections and rests that starts and ends at a crew base and is assigned to a single crew. The crew pairing problem consists of determining a minimum cost set of feasible crew pairings such that each flight is covered exactly once and side constraints are satisfied. Traditionally, this problem has been solved in the industry by a heuristic three-phase approach that solves sequentially a daily, a weekly, and a monthly problem. This approach prohibits or strongly penalizes the repetition of the same flight number in a pairing. In this paper, we highlight two weaknesses of the three-phase approach and propose alternative solution approaches that exploit flight number repetitions in pairings. First, when the flight schedule is irregular, we show that better quality solutions can be obtained in less computational time if the first two phases are skipped and the monthly problem is solved directly using a rolling horizon approach based on column generation. Second, for completely regular flight schedules, we show that better quality solutions can be derived by skipping the daily problem phase and solving the weekly problem directly.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1016/j.cor.2010.11.003
Computers & OR
Keywords
DocType
Volume
possible repetition,weekly problem,flight schedule,Rolling horizon approach,flight number,Aircrew pairings,Pairings with flight repetitions,better quality solution,crew base,feasible crew,flight number repetition,monthly problem,daily problem phase,Three-phase approach,Column generation,Crew pairing problem,crew pairing
Journal
40
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
3
Computers and Operations Research
9
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.51
7
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mohammed Saddoune1493.74
Guy Desaulniers287462.90
François Soumis382197.64