Algorithms for Airline Crew Scheduling Problem

Next to fuel costs, crew costs are the largest direct operating cost of airlines. The goal of airlines is to find the best schedule for the crews. In this paper we present a Branch and Price algorithm for solving crew scheduling problem as deterministic and do not explicitly include information on potential disruptions. The method consists of the following stages: the formulation of the master and slave problems, their solution and implementation of the branch and bound method to get an integer solution for the initial problem. To formulate the master problem, a greedy algorithm was proposed to search for a subset of variables. The paper presents a heuristic algorithm for searching for the initial solution, which is then used to find the most violated constraint in the dual problem. The search for the integer solution of the original problem is performed using the branch and bound method in the Branch and Price method. Branching occurs in fractional variables with fixed values of integer variables.