There are pilots, flight attendants, grounds people, reservationists, baggage handlers, cooks, janitors, mechanics, etc. Fortunately, for United's manpower planners, they were only charged with developing a scheduling program for the employees in the reservation offices. Although the assignment to schedule over 4,000 reservation office employees is not as difficult as scheduling the entirety of the airlines employees, it is still a formidable task. The program was used to schedule 4,000 plus workers and combined both daily and weekly scheduling in a single model. The manpower planning model consists of 20,000 decision variables and is able to effectively produce monthly shift schedules.
All airlines face an even greater scheduling challenge.
The airline flight-crew scheduling problem is considered to be the most difficult scheduling problem in operations research. The problem is complicated by safety regulations and union work rules. Azriel Chelst HTML Master Sculptors Inc.