Combinatorial auction algorithm with price-adjustment mechanism for airline crew scheduling problems

In this paper, we propose a combinatorial auction algorithm for airline crew scheduling problems. The objective is to achieve the equalization of working time for crew members. In the combinatorial auction algorithm, each crew member is regarded as a bidder and the combination of the rosters is considered as the packages of items that a bid can be placed. A new combinatorial auction algorithm with price-adjustment mechanism is proposed. Two types of bidding algorithms are combined. One is the random bids with neighborhood search, and the second one is the solution derived from the Lagrangian relaxation with subgradient optimization, which is called as the price adjustment mechanism. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown from the computational results.