Airline Crew Scheduling Using The Differential Evolution Method

Airline crew rostering is the assignment problem of crew members to planned rotations/pairings for certain month. Airline companies have the monthly task of constructing personalized monthly schedules (roster) for crew members. This problem increased more and more complex and difficult while the aspirations/criterias grew to assess the quality of roster and the constraints increased excessively. This paper proposed the differential evolution (DE) method to solve the airline rostering problem. Different from the common DE, this paper presented random swap as mutation operator. The DE algorithm is proven able to find the near optimal solution accurately for optimization problem. Through numerical experiment with some datasets from Merpati Nusantara Airlines company, DE showed more competitive results than two other method, column generation and MOSI (the one used by the Airline). DE produced good results for small and medium datasets, but still showed reasonable results for large dataset.