Air force crew allocation and scheduling problem

Abstract

This thesis addresses an airline crew allocation and scheduling problem faced by certain divisions of the United States Air Force. Three variants of the problem under consideration were posed by the Brooks U.S. Air Force Base. This thesis reports on experience with two heuristic methods developed, each applicable to the different variants of the problem. Although the problem described herein is peculiar to this situation, the heuristic scheduling and dispatching rules developed have been found to be very effective, and are generally applicable in other related contexts of routing, and crew and vehicle scheduling problems as well. The two algorithms developed have been applied to a coded set of real world data. The results indicate that each one of the two methods is preferable over the other for one of the two variants of the problem, and they are equally effective for the third variant. The observations made in this study suggest an overall effective composite technique for this class of problems.