1022. Strategic Crew Pairing in Long-Haul Airline Operations
Invited abstract in session WA-15: Discrete, continuous or stochastic optimization and control in networks, transportation and design 1, stream Combinatorial Optimization.
Wednesday, 8:30-10:00Room: Esther Simpson 1.08
Authors (first author is the speaker)
| 1. | Mohamed Ben Ahmed
|
| Faculty of Logistics, Molde University College | |
| 2. | Henning Lied Gullbekk
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| Industrial Economics and Technology Management, NTNU | |
| 3. | Trym Wian
|
| Industrial Economics and Technology Management, NTNU | |
| 4. | Magnus Stålhane
|
| NTNU |
Abstract
The Crew Pairing Problem (CPP) is an important problem in airline scheduling, where long-haul operations introduce unique complexities. While the goal remains to assign crew to flights at minimal cost while ensuring regulatory compliance, long-haul scheduling must also account for extended duty periods, multiple crew bases, layovers, deadheading, and additional crew regulations, which significantly impact cost and feasibility. This study introduces two network flow models to optimize crew pairing for a transatlantic, low-cost airline. The first model assumes unlimited crew, minimizing pairing costs such as layovers, deadheading, and time away from base. The second introduces limited crew, formulated as a bi-objective optimization problem that balances cost minimization with the number of required crew members. Unlike conventional set-partitioning formulations, our formulations explicitly model deadheading and crew requirements. Both models are non-linear in their initial representation but were transformed into equivalent linear models.
Computational experiments on real-world airline data show that both models can efficiently determine crew paring for flight schedules up to 2,000 flights and 7-month planning horizon. The models’ results provide insights into crew base allocation strategies, robust scheduling strategies, and cost trade-offs, offering a scalable, exact, and computationally efficient framework for strategic crew planning in long-haul airline operations.
Keywords
- Airline Applications
- Scheduling
- Mathematical Programming
Status: accepted
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