Partially Integrated Airline Crew Scheduling for Team-oriented Rostering

Summary

Crew scheduling for airlines requires an optimally scheduled coverage of flights with regard to given timetables. We consider the crew scheduling and rostering process for airlines, where crew members are stationed unevenly among home bases. In addition, their availability changes dynamically during the planning period due to pre-scheduled activities, such as office and simulator duties, vacancy, or requested off-duty days.

Besides this highly complex setting, crew satisfaction becomes more and more important: Recent approaches focus on a variety of quality-of-life criteria like the consideration of individual preferences. Hence most of them are applied to individual rosters; certain aspects especially for the appropriate handling of teams are neglected. Therefore the introduced concept of Team-oriented Rostering addresses the upcoming demand for a reduction of the usually high amount of team changes among crew members within daily or day-by-day team compositions. It relies on the optimal set of roster combinations for the scheduled crew members within the assignment step.