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.