A Decision Support Framework for the Airline Crew Schedule Disruption Management with Strategy Mapping

Abstract

Disruption management for airline crew schedules is important for the airline industry, since an increasing amount of disruptions to the regular operations occur frequently. The emphasis of this task is put on quickly obtaining one or more reasonable, at best optimal, recovery solutions from current disruptions, which has to be achieved within an acceptable time period. In this work, we propose a decision support framework that combines exact optimization methods and meta-heuristics for solving real-life practical problems. An exact method, based on a Column Generation type of procedure, is studied and tested, while a dedicated Genetic Algorithm working with a local improvement procedure provides the capability to solve the problem alternatively. Notably, a so-called strategy mapping procedure is applied to customize solution methods.