Airline irregular operations are airline operations under irregular situations, which usually means some disturbances or perturbations have happened or are expected to happen in such a manner that they have disrupted or will disrupt the normal operations of the airline. At major airlines, crew management during irregular operations is a very inefficient process due to the complicated crew schedule, restrictive crew legalities and work rules. Very often, the fact that no appropriate solution is found in a timely manner results in flight cancellations and delays. The problem is also called crew pairing repair. Solving crew pairing repair problem quickly is critical to airline operations and will have direct impact to the airline's revenue. This dissertation discusses the crew management issues during irregular operations. A model is developed for the crew pairing repair problem. Both traditional OR algorithm and some heuristic algorithms are devised to solve the problem. It is demonstrated that the heuristic algorithms are far more flexible and are the preferred method. Using real data from an airline, the algorithms are shown efficient enough to solve large-scale crew pairing repair problem in real-time. In addition, future developments of the algorithms are also discussed. This dissertation is the first effort to use sophisticated model and algorithms to solve crew management problem during irregular operations.
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