Manpower planning for airline pilots : A tabu search approach

Abstract: The airline industry faces some of the largest and most complicated optimization problems among all industries today. A large part of their costs iscrew costs and large savings can be made by efficient manpower planning. The research focus has been on the later steps in the planning process such as crew scheduling. The focus of this thesis is on the largely unexplored research area of staffing and transition planning for pilots. For the important question of which pilot should receive training to which position no solution strategy with optimization has, before this thesis, been presented. One reason for this might be that many complicated regulations concern this question, making an easily solved model impossible. I have developed a tabu search based algorithm with encouraging results. The algorithm was tested on data from Scandinavian Airlines. Compared to a reference algorithm based on commercial mixed integer programming software, the tabu search algorithm finds similar solutions about 30 times faster. I show how tabu search can be tailored to a specific complicated problem, and the results are good enough to not only be of theoretical interest but also of direct practical interest for use in the airline industry.