IntroductionAutomating cost-efficient scheduling in the airlines is getting more and more significant in recent years. As new low cost carriers come to appear, it is highly required for traditional full service carriers to reduce the operational costs. In the airlines, there are many types of scheduling problems in order to operate their flights. These problems are commonly categorized into flight scheduling design, fleet assignment, aircraft maintenance routing and crew scheduling (Dawid et al., 2001). In these problems, crew scheduling problems are well-known as one of the most difficult problems in the airlines (Guo et al., 2006). There are commonly two phases in the airline crew scheduling problems: the crew pairing problems and the crew rostering problems. In the crew pairing problems, a crew pairing that is a sequence of flight duties is allocated. Pairings are generated such that all of the duties are covered by the least number of pairings. The pairing also originates and terminates at the crew base. In the crew rostering problems, each pairing, holidays and reserved duties are assigned to each crew member satisfying all hard constraints such as rest days, rules and regulations. The reserved duties are trainings, medical appointments and so on. In this paper, we study a static crew rostering problem when the set of crew pairings is given in advance. It is hard to solve the crew rostering problems due to a large number of hard constraints. However, it is still important to obtain a better schedule because the quality of the solution has a direct impact on the operational costs in the airline industry.The constraints of the airline crew rostering problems differ for each airline company or each case study. For instance, there are consecutive flight days constraints (Gamache et al., 1998), rest days constraints (Souai and Teghem, 2009), total working time constraints (Moudani et al., 2001;Souai and Teghem, 2009). The problem in this paper additionally considers the practical constraints on consecutive rest days after an international flight, prohibition of assignment of crew members with the same group to the same duty. Most of the conventional studies do not emphasize on these practical constraints. The objective function of the problem also differs for each case. For instance, minimizing the operational 1 Tsubasa DOI * and Tatsushi NISHI * * Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University 1-3 Machikaneyama-cho, Toyonaka city 560-8531, Japan E-mail: nishi@sys.es.osaka-u.ac.jp Received 15 November 2015 AbstractWe 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 ...
We propose a new two-level decomposition algorithm for shift scheduling problems. The problem determines the assignment of duties and rest days to the set of staff members to minimize the given objective function. The constraint on the set of staff members are considered. The objective of this paper is to achieve the minimization of total costs with fairness of working conditions. The proposed method decomposes the original problem into the master and the subproblems. These subproblems are iteratively solved with embedding cuts into the master problem. Computational results show that the performance of the proposed method outperforms a generalpurpose constraint logic programming solver.Shift scheduling problems has received much attention with growing service industry, social systems and infrastructures. The problem is to find an optimal assignment of duties and rest days to weekly schedules for staff members including rest days and working days. The shift scheduling problems appear in airline, railway transportations, traffic systems, nurse scheduling in health care systems [3]. It is highly desired to develop the scheduling system for solving general shift scheduling problems. In practice, to achieve fairness of working conditions for staff members is one of the difficult tasks for shift scheduling problems because there are a number of hard constraints due to several regulations for working conditions of staff members. Due to the variety of the constraints, the computational complexity of shift scheduling problems becomes increasing if the number of duties, staff members and scheduling time horizon is large.Most of the conventional methods are concentrated on the application of heuristics [5] or meta-heuristic methods [9]. However, the performance of these heuristic methods depends on the selection of parameters for their search. Also, the solution is obtained by the heuristic algorithms cannot be optimality evaluation. Recently, column generation or branch and price methods are also widely studied on shift scheduling problems [8].For shift scheduling models, the preference or its satisfaction model has been studied [6], [8]. The model with full-time and part-time workers has been developed [7].In this paper, we propose a novel two-level decomposition algorithm for shift scheduling problems to achieve fair working conditions. A two-level decomposition algorithm for crew rostering problems with fair working condition has been proposed [1]. The proposed method has the characteristic that the problem is decomposed into the master problem and the subproblems. The master problem determines the assignment of duties and the number of staff members. The main difference between this paper and reference [1] is to consider the constraint on the required number of staff members for a duty. The subproblem cannot be decomposed into several subproblems for each staff and solved difficultly by that constraint. The subproblem is a feasibility problem to check the existence of a feasible shift schedule when the solution of the ...
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