An intelligent approach for solving the airline crew rostering problem

A bi-criterion approach for the nominal airline crew rostering problem is developed. The nominal crew rostering problem considers the assignment of crew staff to a set of pairings covering all the scheduled flights so that operation costs are minimized while its solution must meet hard constraints resulting from the safety regulations of civil aviation as well as from airline internal agreements. Another goal of the highest interest to airlines is that overall satisfaction of crew staff may have important consequences on the quality and economic return of operations. A new mathematical formulation of the crew scheduling problem which takes into account the satisfaction of crew members is proposed. A heuristic approach, combined with a genetic algorithm technique, is adopted to produce reduced cost solutions associated with acceptable satisfaction levels for the crew staff. The application of the proposed approach to a medium sized airline crew rostering problem is evaluated.