Operational Airline Reserve Crew Planning

1
Operational Airline Reserve Crew Planning
Adnan Tula
2
Agenda

• Introduction
• The Pre-month Planning Process
• Reserve Crew Schedules
• Building Reserve Patterns
• Increasing Operational Reserve Availability
• Conclusions

3
Introduction

• Cockpit crew manpower planning is a challenging
  task
• Crew costs account for major portion of airline
  operating expenses
• Classification Regular crews reserve crews
• Regular crews are used to cover the flying needs
• Their work schedules are optimized to maximize
  such coverage

4
Introduction

• Bidline system bidding-invoked conflicts
• Large portion of flying drops out of optimized
  work schedules
• Unassigned flying due to daily disruptions
• Reserve crews are needed to cover these
  unassigned and uncovered flying
• Not much effort spent for higher reserve
  utilization and availability

5
Introduction

• Not much effort spent for higher reserve
  utilization and availability
• Current state-of-the-art reserve planning systems
• Identify daily operational reserve requirements
• Generate legal reserve work schedules
• Set-covering algorithm to select a subset of work
  schedules
• Most reserve planning systems
• Fail to capture various sources of reserve demand
• Not consider that duration of flying assigned to
  reserves vary

6
Introduction

• Bidding-invoked conflicts lack of reserve
  planning methodologies
• Higher reserve staffing numbers
• Underutilized reserve crews
• Integrated reserve optimization strategy
• Characterize reserve demand in terms of open-time
  trips
• Construct reserve work schedules to cover
  open-time trips
• Recurrent-training and vacation

7
The Pre-month Planning Process
8
The Pre-month Planning Process

• Regular bidlines do not meet training, vacation
  etc.
• Crew members bid for these optimized bidlines
• Bidding-and-award process based on seniority
  ranking
• Bidding-invoked conflicts
• Many trips drop out of optimal bidlines
• Uncovered trips collectively called open-time
• In some instances 40 of trips fall into
  open-time
• Direct/Indirect conflicts
• Unassigned trips during daily operations

9
Reserve Crew Schedules (Reserve patterns)

• Consist of groups of consecutive off-duty and
  on-duty days
• 111000011111000011111000001111
• Pattern type
• Total number of off-duty days
• Groupings of off-duty days
• Identified by the consecutive off-duty day
  groupings (4-4-3-2)

10
Reserve Crew Schedules

• Reserve pay structure and operational costs
• Paid for a fixed number of hours (reserve
  guarantee)
• Consists of adjusted reserve guarantee and pay
  for flown trips
• Premium pay in the range of tens of millions
  dollars
• Average reserve utilization lt 40 of reserve
  guarantee

11
Building Reserve Patterns
12
Building Reserve Patterns

• Phase 1 generates reserve demand estimating
  open-time trips
• Phase 2 generates patterns to cover the demand
• Reserve demand is due to
• Pre-month bidding-invoked conflicts
• Unplanned daily operations
• The term open-time is used to define trips from
  both resources

13
Estimating Reserve Demand due to Bidding-invoked
Conflicts
MAXCONF gives reserve demand due to
bidding-invoked conflicts.
14
Estimating Reserve Demand for Daily Operations

• Reserve demand due to unplanned daily operations
• Strategy to estimate operational reserve demand
  SimAir
• Regular-bidlines, aircraft rotations, block times
  and aircraft maintenance distributions, expected
  weather patterns etc.
• Simulates the operation of the flight schedule
• Modified SimAir to simulate monthly reserve demand

15
Optimizing Reserve Patterns

• Reserve duty period
• String of trips which can be flown in the
  specified sequence without any rule violations
• Reserve work schedule
• A bid period-long sequence of reserve duty
  periods mapping to a legal reserve pattern

16
Optimizing Reserve Patterns

• Two phases of optimization process
• Phase A selects a set of reserve duty periods
  that cover all open-time trips
• Phase B selects the required number of reserve
  patterns to generate reserve work schedules
• Standard set-covering and set-partitioning models
• Objective of phase B
• Cover the maximum number of reserve duty periods
  with the required (minimum) number of reserve
  patterns

17
Optimizing Reserve Patterns
18
Phase A Generating Reserve Duty Periods

• Duty periods with duration between 3-5 days
• Primary objective is to cover the set of trips
  with minimum number of reserve duty periods

19
Phase A Generating Reserve Duty Periods
20
Phase B Generating Reserve Work Schedules
21
Phase B Generating Reserve Work Schedules
22
Computational Experiments
23
Increasing Operational Reserve Availability

• Bidding-invoked conflicts contribute to open-time
  trips
• Proposed scheme
• Recurrent training schedules are assigned after
  bidding-and-awards process
• Build and place with the minimum possible
  conflict
• Control the number and duration of open-time
  trips while maintaining sufficient reserve
  availability

24
Controlling Reserve Availability in
Recurrent-training Scheduling
25
Controlling Reserve Availability in
Recurrent-training Scheduling
26
Computational Experiments
27
Conclusions

• Reserve crew costs are a major portion of
  operating budgets
• Efficient utilization of reserves is necessary
• RESOPT
• effectively increases reserve availability
• controls reserve manpower
• lowers long range manpower costs significantly

28
Thank you for listening!Any questions?