A heuristic method for solving airline crew pairing problems

The airline crew pairing problem is one of the optimization problems which classified as a NP-hard problem. Since the number of feasible pairings in flight schedules can be numerous, the exact methods will not efficient to solve the problem. We propose a heuristic method for solving crew pairing problems. Initially, we generate a feasible solution by maximizing the covered flights. Then, we improve the solution by constructing a procedure to avoid the local optimal solution. We test our method to an airline schedules. The computational results show that our method can give the optimal solution in short period of time