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Airline planning consists of several problems that are currently solved separately. We address a partial integration of schedule planning, aircraft routing, and crew scheduling. In particular, we provide more flexibility for crew scheduling while maintaining the feasibility of aircraft routing by adding plane-count constraints to the crew-scheduling problem. In addition, we assume that the departure times of flights have not yet been fixed and we are allowed to move the departure time of a flight as long as it is within a given time window. We demonstrate that such a model yields solutions to the crew-scheduling problem with significantly lower costs than those obtained from the traditional model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The airline crew scheduling problem is the problem of assigning crew itineraries to flights. The problem is hard due to a large number of itineraries and the complicated cost function of an itinerary. The classic approach, which uses a set partitioning formulation, only captures the objective function of minimizing cost. We add a second goal of maximizing the repetition or regularity of itineraries over a weekly horizon and we develop models that capture regularity. We present a new algorithm that solves the crew scheduling problem over a weekly horizon. Solutions are reported that improve on existing solutions used by an airline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]