Optimizing Flight Crew Schedules

Ira Gershkoff
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Ira Gershkoff: American Airlines, PO Box 619616, Mail Drop 2B56, Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, Texas 75261-9616

Interfaces, 1989, vol. 19, issue 4, 29-43

Abstract: Because of restrictive work rules and interacting cost components, building flight crew schedules is a complex process. However, operations research techniques have been successful in reducing crew costs. The optimization is modeled as a set-partitioning problem, where the rows represent flights to be covered and the columns represent candidate crew trips. The work rules dictate whether or not a particular crew trip is valid, while the major cost components affect its desirability. Solving many sets of small subproblems has been more successful than attempting to find a global solution to a single large problem because of combinatorial problems and non-integer solutions. At American Airlines, the savings of the integer linear programming (ILP) approach relative to the enumeration methods previously used is estimated at $18 million per year. Intuitive evidence suggests that a global optimum is being achieved for small fleets (200 flights per day or less), but that additional savings are possible in the larger fleets.

Keywords: transportation: air; programming: integer: applications (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1989
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

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