案例库 · 工程与运营 · 运营决策 · 1984–2000
这条还没译成中文，下面是英文原文。
Air New Zealand automated crew planning and rostering, saving NZ$15.6m a year.
A 16-year Auckland university collaboration replaced manual crew rosters with optimization, cutting staff and rules violations and improving service.
Air New Zealand
那一手
In 1984 Air New Zealand handled all crew decisions manually and used no OR/MS; a six-month university honours project on domestic crew planning began a 16-year collaboration.
The team built seven optimization-based systems covering planning and rostering for national and international crews, including a 1989 international flight-attendant roster that was among the first optimization-based rostering systems, with a 5% crew reduction and better crew-preferred rosters.
The tools cut the rostering staff from 18 in 1987 to eight, took roster construction from two weeks and six builders to under four person-days, and reduced crew-related costs such as hotel and meal expenses; the effort led to NZ$15.6 million (about US$7 million) a year in savings.
Solution times fell to around an hour for a Boeing 767 pilot plan and under five minutes for a 747-400 plan, letting the airline evaluate many more schedule proposals before publishing them.
为什么管用
- Crew is the airline's second-biggest cost after fuel
- Set-partitioning structure makes huge instances solvable
- Optimization guarantees feasibility and rule compliance
- Measured: NZ$15.6m a year and far fewer planning staff
可以搬走什么
Rule-heavy allocation problems reward investment in model structure: crew is costlier and more constrained than fuel, so a small improvement in crew use returns large repeatable savings.
后来呢
Air New Zealand became dependent on state-of-the-art optimization for planning and rostering, hired an in-house OR group, and reached the final round of the 2000 INFORMS Edelman Award, while the methods influenced airline crew-scheduling practice broadly.
资料来源
- Optimization Earns Its Wings (OR/MS Today, by David M. Ryan)
- Air New Zealand honored in operations research competition (INFORMS release)
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