Operational airline reserve crew planning

Authors:
Milind G. Sohoni;Ellis L. Johnson;T. Glenn Bailey
Affiliations:
AC4 - Level 1, Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, India 500019;School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA 30332-0205;Aff3 Aff4
Venue:
Journal of Scheduling
Year:
2006

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Abstract

Airlines are continually faced with the challenge of efficient utilization of their cockpit crew resources. In addition to regular flying crews, some airlines have to maintain significant reserve staffing levels to meet contractual obligations and provide smooth daily operations. Reserve crews are required to cover trips remaining unassigned due to disruptions during daily operations. Airlines using a bidline system to award crew work schedules require additional reserves to cover scheduling conflicts, which result in trips dropping out of optimized bidlines. Whenever reserves are unavailable to cover these trips during daily operations, the airline has to pay a premium to cover these trips using regular pilots. The resulting operating expenses can be significant. Furthermore, inefficient utilization of reserves can cause excessive long-range crew staffing resulting in additional training and new hire expenses. In this paper, we propose a new optimization strategy to increase reserve crew utilization and build monthly reserve crew work schedules by addressing the issue of scheduling conflicts and daily operational reserve requirements.