Solving a large-scale crew pairing problem

Abstract

Airline companies seek to solve the problem of determining an assignment of crews to a pre-determined flight schedule with minimum total cost, called the Crew Pairing Problem (CPP). Most of the existing studies focus on the CPP of North American airlines, which widely differs from that of most European airline companies in terms of the objective function, the flight structure, and the planning horizon. In this study, we develop an optimization-driven heuristic algorithm that can efficiently handle large-scale instances of the CPP that must be solved on a monthly basis. We perform computational experiments using flight schedules of an European airline company to test the performance of the solution method. Our computational results demonstrate that our algorithm is able to provide high-quality solutions to monthly instances with up to 27 000 flight legs.

Keywords:

• crew pairing problem
• metaheuristic
• set partitioning
• monthly problem

Acknowledgements

This project is funded in part by TUBITAK grant 110M308. We thank the five anonymous referees for their valuable comments, which have improved the paper substantially.