An integrated modeling approach for multi-class individual crew scheduling in demand channels

Abstract

Emergencies such as airlifts, evacuations, and humanitarian missions demand immediate and precise crew scheduling solutions. Unlike classical crew scheduling, emergency missions involve heterogeneous crews with diverse qualifications, each subject to unique compatibility requirements with various aircraft types and flights. Further complexities arise from the need to balance crew availability, rest and duty hour constraints, cross-crew substitution, and crew complement at different stages. This study addresses the unique challenges of high-stake scenarios in demand channels for multi-class crews considering individual skills, duty, and rest hour requirements due to flight-specific eligibility and specificity of multi-class crew constraints. A pre-processing framework is developed to sort the eligible crew members, followed by an exact and heuristic approach to optimize crew allocation. The study introduces a novel mixed integer programming model for multi-class crew assignments, accommodating individual qualifications, rank, crew compliments, accumulated duty, and rest hours during crew engagements. For large-scale implementation, the study proposes a heuristic framework combining Orthogonal Construction (OC) and Large Neighborhood Search (LNS) to enhance solution quality and scalability.