A column generation approach to the airline crew pairing problem to minimize the total person-days

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the crew pairing problem in airline scheduling that calls for assigning crew members in order to cover all flights with the minimum total person-days under the constraints that the schedule of each crew member does not violate given constraints on the total working time, flying time, and the number of landings. In practical applications, it is difficult to create an efficient schedule satisfying all the constraints. We formulate the problem as a set covering problem and apply an LP-based column generation approach to generate a candidate set of schedules. We propose a branch-and-bound method based upon a resource constrained dynamic programming for the column generation procedure. Computational results are given for a number of large-scale instances with up to 10,000 flights.