EURO 2024 Copenhagen
Abstract Submission

EURO-Online login

929. The crew split problem: team creation for the cabin crew pairing problem with several qualification classes and varying requirements.

Invited abstract in session WB-29: Large Scale Optimization in Air Transportation, stream Combinatorial Optimization.

Wednesday, 10:30-12:00
Room: 157 (building: 208)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Frédéric Quesnel
GERAD
2. Mohand Ryad Chelbani
GERAD, Polytechnique
3. Francois Soumis
GERAD

Abstract

It is usually beneficial for airlines that cabin crews travel in teams for entire pairings (sequence of flights, connections, and rest, forming one or several days of work). In addition to improving morale and team efficiency, travelling in teams increases the robustness of the schedule. However, different flights may have different crew requirements, so it is not always possible to have a whole team work on two consecutive flights. In those cases, it may be beneficial to use a core team to cover most of the requirements and use complementary crews to cover the missing assignments. Finding the optimal way to form teams has been identified as an issue but has never been tackled.


In this talk, we formulate the crew split problem, whose role is to determine the core team composition of each flight as well as the complementary crews that will join it. It is a multi-objective optimization problem that, among others, maximizes the size of each core team, minimizes the estimated connexion times, and minimizes the estimated deadhead costs. In addition, our model allows for downranking, which is the possibility of a higher-ranked crew to work a lower-ranked position. We show the benefits of using the crew split problem on a large real-world instance.

Keywords

Status: accepted

Back to the list of papers