Preliminary Report 1 on Rapid Response Algorithms for Optimizing the Utilization of Human Resources in Flight Crews: Scheduling Aircrews to Aircrafts

摘要

Consider an airlift operation which consists of several routes, each having missions which are subject to given time schedules. The aircraft are manned with aircrews that are required to rest for a certain period of time after each leg of a mission. A mission may be continued whenever a rested aircrew is available at the location. Given the number of missions that are needed to be flown on the different routes, and given the schedule timetable that is associated with those missions, we consider the problems: (1) What is the minimum number of crews that are needed to maintain the operation. (2) How many aircrews are needed to be staged at each location. (3) If the number of available aircrews is less than the minimum needed, which legs of what missions may be delayed so that the minimum required number of aircrews is reduced. We will exclude from the analysis the trivial case where the rest period of the aircrews is always less than the period of time for which the aircrafts are delayed. If this is the case, then it is clear that the minimum number of aircrews is equal to the number of missions and all the aircrews must be staged initially at the home base.