Objective
The objective of the PARROT project is to provide efficient means to address the highly complex and costly problem of airline crew scheduling.
Given the traditional breakdown of crew scheduling into (I) crew pairing: identifying a sequence of duty periods from (a) home-base to (another) home-base, and (ii) crew rostering: assigning a set of pairings to each crew, usually on a monthly basis, PARROT proposes to concentrate on improvement of crew rostering quality and performance by applying a parallel approach, and by developing on promising results in the combination of Operations Research (OR) techniques and Constraint Programming (CP). Identification of the optimal "mix" of techniques and the appropriate degree of parallelization for the characteristics of different airlines will result in approaches that are adapted to small, medium and large-size companies' situations. The goal of PARROT is to produce the following output:
A parallel solver, proven efficient in identified airline crew rostering contexts
A rostering constraint library, for use in crew rostering for airlines and analogous organisations (trains, ...) and conceived for ease of adaptation to neighbouring contexts
Components combining parallelized specific OR- and CP- based crew rostering algorithms, proven efficient in identified airline crew rostering contexts
Agreed recommendations and experimentation with a trans-nationally applicable regulations definition language.
An evaluated and validated demonstrator, customised for use at each of the airline sites.
ILOG will add a constraint library dedicated to rostering, together with the parallelised constraint solving engine, to its product line. Lufthansa Systems and Carmen Systems will commercialise dedicated airline crew scheduling products. Olympic Airways plans on deploying project results directly in-house. Both universities intend to carry out research and publication activities involving both OR and CP.
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
94250 Gentilly
France