Representing Labor Demands in Airport Ground Staff Scheduling

Summary

Airport ground staff scheduling gives rise to a number of challenging optimization problems. We give an overview of airport shift scheduling, focusing on suitable representations for labor demands. We argue that especially in short-term shift planning, traditional models using a demand curve representation of workloads are not always appropriate in ground handling. We therefore formulate task-level shift planning as the problem of creating a cost-minimal set of shift duties which cover the given set of work tasks. The resulting model integrates aspects from shift scheduling and vehicle routing. Depending on the number of additional constraints imposed, different solution techniques seem appropriate. We outline a branch-andprice algorithm which is able to solve an important class of task-level shift planning problems from the practice of airlines and ground handling companies to proven optimality within reasonable run-times.