Robust Aircraft Squadron Scheduling in the Face of Absenteeism

Air Force fighter aircraft squadrons the world over share a unique problem. Each requires complex training schedules coupling aircraft to pilots, the duo to missions and airspaces, and then the entire combination to a feasible time slot. Creating daily and weekly flight schedules that include shifts around the clock every day of the year with a set number of pilots is a time consuming job for manual schedulers within a squadron. If one or more pilots are unable to perform their previously assigned tasks, due to sickness or aircraft failure, those tasks must be performed by previously not scheduled pilots. These changes can not conflict with the rules of Air Force regulations, squadron policy, the squadron commander, operations officer or flight training officer's direction. Given these constraints, the goal of a new re-rostered schedule, in the event of absenteeism, should be to affect the previous schedule as little as possible. This research will develop a weekly flight schedule. The goal of this reformulated schedule is robustness to absenteeism. In order to find a robust schedule, a comparison will be done to select the most robust schedule from among 17 candidate schedules. The expected values for the number of changes for each schedule are compared, and a general conclusion will be provided using a new objective function to create a model that yields a robust schedule on the first attempt.