Using Differential Evolution Method to Solve Crew Rostering Problem

Abstract

Airline crew rostering is the assignment problem of crew members to planned rotations/pairings for certain month. Airline companies have the monthly task of constructing personalized monthly schedules (roster) for crew members. This problem became more complex and difficult while the aspirations/criterias to assess the quality of roster grew and the constraints increased excessively. This paper proposed the differential evolution (DE) method to solve the airline rostering problem. Different from the common DE, this paper presented random swap as mutation operator. The DE algorithm is proven to be able to find the near optimal solution accurately for the optimization problem. Through numerical experiments with some real datasets, DE showed more competitive results than two other methods, column generation and MOSI (the one used by the Airline). DE produced good results for small and medium datasets, but it still showed reasonable results for large dataset. For large crew rostering problem, we proposed decomposition procedure to solve it in more efficient manner using DE.