WHAT IT CAN DO FOR YOU

Air New Zealand Masters the Art of Crew Scheduling

The Problem
Air New Zealand Limited, an international and domestic airline group that provides air passenger and cargo transport services, needed to improve the way it scheduled tours of duty and rosters. The challenge consisted of two problems: a tours-of-duty planning problem to generate minimum-cost tours of duty (sequences of duty periods and rest periods) to cover all scheduled flights, and a rostering problem to assign tours of duty to individual crew members. Solving these problems would require operations research expertise in complex scheduling and routing.

The O.R. Solution
Between 1986 and 1999, Air New Zealand staff and consultants, in collaboration with the University of Auckland, developed eight optimization-based computer systems to solve all aspects of the tours-of-duty planning and rostering processes for the airline's national and international operations.

The Value
As of 2000, these systems had saved NZ$15,655,000 per year while providing crew rosters that better respect crew members' preferences.

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