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Best Practice Simulated Annealing for the Airline Crew Scheduling Problem

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Abstract

We report about a study of a simulated annealing algorithm for the airline crew pairing problem based on a run-cutting formulation. Computational results are reported for some real-world short- to medium-haul test problems with up to 4600 flights per month. Furthermore we find that run time can be saved and solution quality can be improved by using a problem specific initial solution, by relaxing constraints “as far as possible”, by combining simulated annealing with a problem specific local improvement heuristic and by multiple independent runs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Informatik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, December, 14th, 1998, Germany

    Thomas Emden-Weinert & Mark Proksch

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  1. Thomas Emden-Weinert
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  2. Mark Proksch
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Emden-Weinert, T., Proksch, M. Best Practice Simulated Annealing for the Airline Crew Scheduling Problem. Journal of Heuristics 5, 419–436 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009632422509

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