Optimization of flight deck crew assignments on Scandinavian Airlines' intercontinental flights

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The harsh competition in the airline industry continuously forces airline carriers to streamline their production and cut back on costs. Manpower constitutes the largest expense in Scandinavian Airline System, closely followed by fuel costs. Thus effective crew planning is vital to face the competition from international actors and low cost carriers.Creating efficient schedules for airline crew is a very complex combinatorial task and the process is heavily dependent on optimization. A large set of constraints comprised of union- and governmental rules as well as company policies and quality factors must be taken into consideration when the schedules are created.This master thesis examines how the distribution of rank in the SAS international pilot corps affects the total cost associated with flight deck crew.Long haul flights at SAS intercontinental are manned with a captain, a first officer and a relief pilot. Pilots may man lower ranking positions on any given flight in order to make efficient use of the pilot corps and to minimize the need of full time equivalents.This work discusses the development and evaluation of a simulation environment developed in order to create and analyze fictitious crew populations with different distributions of rank. Furthermore the solution methods to the scheduling problem implemented at SAS and the optimization theory associated with them are discussed.The project has resulted in an e...