Crew Planning and Fleet Assignment Problems at Turkish Airlines
ABSTRACT
Air transport industry is one of the major industries in Turkey and its national significance increases drastically due to the
expected high growth rate in the following years. In recent years, intense domestic and international competition coupled
with fluctuating fuel prices forced airline companies to operate more efficiently. One means to improve efficiency is reducing
the crew related costs such as crew salaries, layover costs and deadheading costs. In order to minimize crew costs in an
airline operation, one has to determine the optimal assignment of crews to a pre-determined flight schedule with minimum
total cost.
Industrial Engineering
Crew scheduling problem, which is considered to be one of the most challenging problems in airline planning, is the
problem of assigning crews to the flight legs with minimum total costs. Generally speaking the domain of this optimization
problem is huge as it involves optimization of thousands of flights and hundreds of crews. Furthermore, the desired output of
the problem, a feasible flight schedule for the crews, should satisfy several complex rules and regulations. Therefore, crew
scheduling problem is a complex optimization problem on a large scale that requires advanced and efficient optimization
techniques to solve. On the other hand, the benefit of solving crew schedule problem overweighs its challenges as small
improvements can lead to significant savings in such a large magnitude.
In this project, the objective is to investigate possible ways to improve the efficiency of operations of Turkish Commercial
and Civil Aviation sector. More specifically, we propose to develop methods to solve the crew scheduling problem of
Turkish airline companies. Turkish Airlines, the industrial partner of the proposed project, will provide real data and problem
specifics that will be used in this project.
2010 National Grants
In the literature, standard and complex solution methodologies are prop