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Mathematics & Physics

An improved multi-objective evolutionary algorithm for airline crew pairing problem

  • Cong LI ,
  • Zhipeng JIANG ,
  • Wenguo YANG
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  • School of Mathematical Sciences,University of Chinese Academy of Sciences,Beijing 100049,China

Received date: 2024-01-24

  Revised date: 2024-06-12

  Online published: 2024-06-24

Supported by

National Natural Science Foundation of China(12071459)

Abstract

The multi-objective airline crew pairing problem tries to find a subset of feasible pairings such that all flights are covered and each objective function is minimized. For this problem, we propose two mathematical models: a novel mathematical model that contains logical relationships, and an integer programming model based on all feasible pairings enumerated by a depth-first search method. To solve the problem, we propose an improved multi-objective evolutionary algorithm, which is a non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm that distinguishes individuals using the distance between the objective vector corresponding to each solution and an adaptive evaluation vector. The proposed algorithm uses the direction of the adaptive evaluation vector and the Pareto orientation for guidance to derive Pareto solutions. We also use a repairing strategy and a local optimization strategy for deriving feasible and better solutions. For this problem, in our experimental results, the performance of the proposed algorithm is superior to those of the traditional nondominated sorting genetic algorithm Ⅱ and another multi-objective genetic algorithm.

Cite this article

Cong LI , Zhipeng JIANG , Wenguo YANG . An improved multi-objective evolutionary algorithm for airline crew pairing problem[J]. Journal of University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 2026 , 43(5) : 590 -602 . DOI: 10.7523/j.ucas.2024.064

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