A Solution Method for Airline Crew Recovery Problems

Abstract

In airline day-to-day operations, schedule disruptions often occur due to some factors. Since the disruptions can cause flight delays or cancelations, the airline should perform a number of recovery actions to re-schedule crews in a short period of time. In this paper, we construct an optimization model of an airline crew recovery problem. We propose an efficient solution method for solving the optimization model. First, we identify the possibility of crew swapping, and then we perform the swappings if it is possible. Crew swappings are quite easy to be implemented, and the problem is directly solved as soon as the swappings are done. If swapping is impossible, we use other procedure for finding a good feasible solution, and then we improve this solution by applying the improvement procedure. We test our method to an airline schedules, and it is shown that the problem can be solved in very short period of time.