An Integrated Approach to the Ground Crew Rostering Problem with Work Patterns

This paper addresses the Ground Crew Rostering Problem with Work Patterns, an important manpower planning problem arising in the ground operations of airline companies. We present a cutting stock based integer programming formulation of the problem and describe a powerful decomposition approach, which utilizes column generation and variable fixing, to construct efficient rosters for a six month time horizon. The time horizon is divided into smaller blocks, where overlaps between the blocks ensure continuity. The proposed methodology is able to circumvent one step of the conventional roster construction process by generating rosters directly based on the estimated workload. We demonstrate that this approach has the additional advantage of being able to easy incorporate robustness in the roster. Computational results on real-life instances confirm the efficiency of the approach.