A VRP-based Approach for the Airline Crew Pairing Problem

A group of orderly flights form a flight pairing. In order to get a minimal total crew cost, an optimal set of flight parings in airline crew pairing problem will be found, which is a key component in the airline operations and scheduling. In this problem, both exact and heuristic algorithms are proposed. The set covering model is a classical approach for the crew pairing problem. But the performance of this model is unsatisfactory in practice. A new way for the crew pairing problem is proposed in this study. Crew pairing problem is formulated as Vehicle Routing Problem(VRP). To solve the problem, we employ a state-of-the-art heuristic algorithm. In order to evaluate the performance of the new approach, we conduct experiments with the data sets from a real airline company. The results show that the new VRP-based model is efficient and the quantity of the solution is acceptable.