Flexible Planning of Leave Periods | Martin W. Andersen
| | Abstract | Planning in the airline industry can be a complex task and may involve many stages before a nal flight and work plan can be created. This work investigates the planning and allocation of leave to cabin crew with a basis in the procedures employed at British Airways. An integrated treatment of part time and full time employees is performed.
A discussion of the di erent components of the leave allocation problem is conducted with particular focus on quantifying employee satisfaction. Three models of the leave allocation problem have been developed where two of these present the business with a suitable formal description of the problem. The first model employed is based on a set packing formulation similar to those employed for the crew rostering problem. The second model extends this framework by introducing uncertainty by means of a stochastic model.
Based on the set packing model and the stochastic model, experiments have been conducted to investigate the effects of moving towards a flexible leave design. Although it was initially believed that increased flexibility would increase employee satisfaction as well as the amount of leave allocated, results showed the opposite. The overall conclusion is that abandoning a more xed leave allocation design can have a negative impact on the employee satisfaction as well as the business fitness of the leave allocation.
A brief experiment with the stochastic model suggested that more robust solutions can be obtained from incorporating predictions of future bidding behaviour. | | Keywords | Leave allocation, airline business, crew scheduling, set packing, stochastic programming, integer programming | | Type | Master's thesis [Academic thesis] | | Year | 2004 | | Publisher | Informatics and Mathematical Modelling, Technical University of Denmark, DTU | | Address | Richard Petersens Plads, Building 321, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby | | Note | This thesis is not public available. Supervised by Prof. Jens Clausen | | BibTeX data | [bibtex] | | IMM Group(s) | Operations Research |
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