Airline crew-scheduling problem with many irregular flights

Abstract

The airline crew-scheduling problem has been investigated for over twenty years. Previous studies have assumed that every flight is available every day during the scheduling period. Recently, however, the number of irregular flights has been increasing in order to satisfy the passengers’ requirements. This article presents a new approach to reducing the total number of man-days in pilots’ round-trip flight patterns (called crew pairings) that cover all regular and irregular flights. It systematically finds ways to merge irregular flights into pairings consisting only of regular flights. The approach is validated by the use of real-world datasets provided by an airline company.