An Integer Programming Approach to Generating Airline Crew Pairings

Key Words: integer programming; column generation; crew pairing; crew scheduling; airline planning. The ability to generate crew pairings quickly is essential to solving the airline crew scheduling problem. Although techniques for doing so are well-established, they are also highly customized and require significant implementation efforts. This greatly impedes researchers studying important problems such as robust planning, integrated planning, and automated recovery, all of which also require the generating of crew pairings. As an alternative, we present an integer programming (IP) approach to generating crew pairings, which can be solved via traditional methods such as branch-and-bound using off-the-shelf commercial solvers. This greatly facilitates the prototyping and testing of new research ideas. In addition, we suggest that our modeling approach, which uses both connection variables and marker variables to capture the non-linear cost function and constraints of the crew scheduling problem, can be applicable in other scheduling contexts as well. Computational results using data from a major U.S. hub-and-spoke carrier demonstrate the performance of our approach.