Alternating Lagrangian Decomposition Combining with Branch and Pricing for Robust and Integrated Airline Aircraft Routing and Crew Pairing
摘要
Generally, the aircraft routing problem and crew pairing problems are solved in sequence, but the found solution may be suboptimal. In this paper, we integrate the aircraft routing and crew pairing problems as a problem. This problem involves not only short connections that aren’t allowed to crews changing aircraft, but also restricted connections that exists the high risk of propagating delay when crews change aircraft. For this problem, We propose a new robust and integrated model with two coupling constraints to improve the robustness of solutions. To solve the robust and integrated model, we propose a heuristic alternating Lagrangian decomposition combining with branch and price algorithm. The solution process iterates between two Lagrangian subproblems that are solved by branch-and-price. The experimental results show the robust-integrated approach is superior to a traditional sequential approach in the aspect of cost savings.