Summary
The airline crew scheduling problem deals with the construction of crew rotations in order to cover the flights of a given schedule at minimum cost. The problem involves complex rules for the legality and costs of individual pairings and base constraints for the availability of crews at home bases. A typical instance considers a planning horizon of one month and several thousand flights. We propose a column generation approach for solving airline crew scheduling problems that is based on a set partitioning model. We discuss algorithmic aspects such as the use of bundle techniques for the fast, approximate solution of linear programs, a pairing generator that combines Lagrangean shortest path and callback techniques, and a novel “rapid branching” IP heuristic. Computational results for a number of industrial instances are reported. Our approach has been implemented within the commercial crew scheduling system NetLine/Crew of Lufthansa Systems Berlin GmbH.
Supported by Lufthansa Systems Berlin.
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Borndörfer, R., Schelten, U., Schlechte, T., Weider, S. (2006). A Column Generation Approach to Airline Crew Scheduling. In: Haasis, HD., Kopfer, H., Schönberger, J. (eds) Operations Research Proceedings 2005. Operations Research Proceedings, vol 2005. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg . https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-32539-5_54
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-32539-5_54
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