Agent-based airline scheduling

The development of an airline schedule can be defined as the art of developing system-wide flight patterns that deliver optimum service to the public in terms of quantity as well as quality. The development of the schedule is market driven with maintenance and crew requirements as constraints. This paper deals with an integrated agent-based approach for the airline scheduling problem. A bidding protocol is used to generate a market based schedule. FIFO and genetic algorithms are used to develop a crew schedule. An expert system combined with the Q-learning algorithm assist operational schedulers in resolving operational conflicts such as delays.