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Approximately a month before take off, the planning process takes place. The airline decides which flights are planned for the next month and assigns an individual aircraft and specific crew members to each flight.
ECO.2000's task is to build round trips for each type of crew member. Many variables exist and must be taken into account when building a round trip. These variables include: which captains are licensed to fly which model of airplane, specific training of flight attendants, special requests, balancing employee overtime, and more.
The monthly planning process contains the following stages:
- Flight schedule planning: Deciding which flights the airline is planning next month, based on the seasonal schedule.
- Fleet assignment: Deciding which type of aircraft is used for each flight.
- Aircraft assignment: Deciding which individual aircraft to use for each flight.
- Solving the crew pairing problem: Building crew assignable tasks that cover all of the flights.
- Crew assignment: Assigning crew members to the tasks and pairings built in the previous stage.
Crew pairing considers El Al's monthly flight schedule, other carrier's flights for potential transfer flights, tail end flights of last month's pairings, rules and preferences, and the cost structure. When all of these variables have been accounted for, El Al is able to completely cover their flight schedule, satisfy all of their legal criteria, minimize costs, and optimize their use of resources.
Problems in the crew scheduling procedure include:
- Three levels of connectivity: flights, duties, and pairings.
- Two dimensions: time and space.
- Billions of combinations.
- Complicated rules: several layers including flight connection, duty, duty connection and pairing; very irregular, crew augmentation, and splitting.
- Complicated cost function: irregular, nonlinear, and noncontinuous.
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