Application of two-phase decomposition algorithm to practical airline crew rostering problem for fair working time

Abstract

We propose an application of a two-phase decomposition algorithm for a practical airline crew rostering problem for fair working time. The problem is to find an optimal assignment of duties to individual crew members such that various hard constraints such as rest days, rules and regulations are satisfied. The objective is to minimize the total deviation of the average working time from the standard working time for crew members. A two-phase decomposition algorithm is successfully applied to solve the problem. The proposed method decomposes the original problem into the master problem and the subproblem. The master problem is solved by an exact algorithm with a generalized set partitioning formulation if all possible rosters are enumerated by an efficient enumeration algorithm. The upper bound is improved by a metaheuristic algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed method for a large scale rostering problem is shown from computational experiments.