Robust crew pairing for managing extra flights /

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1161887 (Table of Contents)

The airline industry encounters many optimization problems such as scheduling flights, assigning the fleet, scheduling the crew. Among them, the crew scheduling problem is the most studied one. The main reason is that the crew cost is one of the largest components of the operational cost for an airline company. Therefore, there are many models proposed in the literature to find a cost efficient crew schedule. Most of those models divide the crew scheduling problem into two separate problems, namely the crew pairing and the crew assignment problems. The crew pairing problem that we study here aims at finding the least costly subset of pairings, which cover the scheduled flights. Although there are many approaches to solve the crew pairing problem, most of them assume no disruptions during the operation. However disruptions due to weather conditions, maintenance problems, and so on are common problems leading to higher operational crew cost in practice. These kinds of disruptions result in delaying or canceling some scheduled flights. Another disruption that local airline companies face is adding an extra flight to predetermined (regular) flight schedule. In this study, we propose a model that provides robust crew pairing schedule in the case of adding an extra flight to the regular flight schedule. Two solution approaches are along with the mathematical model are proposed. The objective of the proposed model is to maximize the total number of solutions, while maintaining the increase in the crew cost at an acceptable level. A crew pairing problem is then solved by both the proposed model and the conventional model. Finally, computational experiments are conducted to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed model.