Paper Title
Application of Benders Decomposition for Solving Integrated Flight Schedule Design and Crew Scheduling in Airlines

Abstract
The Commercial and Operations Planning in airlines has traditionally been a hierarchical process starting with Flight Schedule Design, followed by Fleet Assignment, Aircraft Rotation Planning and finally the Crew Scheduling. The hierarchical planning approach has a drawback that the optimal solution for a planning phase higher in hierarchy may either be infeasible for the subsequent phase or may lead to a sub-optimal integrated planning. In this paper, we propose a formulation forsolving an integrated flight schedule design and crew scheduling problem for a low cost carrier which makesfrequent changes to itsflightscheduleand has a wide universe of candidate flights to choose from.We demonstrate how this large-scale integer programming problem can be solved usingBenders Decomposition. Keywords - Airlines, Integer Programming, Flight Schedule, Crew Scheduling, Benders Decomposition