Crew Scheduling System: The Case of Ethiopian Airlines
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Date
2007-07
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
In this paper, Ethiopian airlines crew scheduling system is considered and investigated. A
crew scheduling decision is one of the decisions among other operational decisions faced by
the Company. The Company has been preparing and distributing the schedules on a weekly
basis and it performs the entire function manually. In EAL, the crew scheduling preparation is
subjected to different rules, regulations, safety considerations, contractual agreements and
conditions of awards and agreements. To check whether these factors are consistently
considered or not, 5 recent schedules prepared on May 28, June 4, 11, 18, and 25 were
reviewed and assessment was made on these schedules by considering the month of June
assignment. In the course of analysis, 20 cabin crew members were randomly selected from
these schedules and the data related with them was analyzed on the basis of monthly duty
time, days-off incorporation, fairness of the assignment in terms of consistently assigning all
available flights to the crew members equitably, and quality (error rates) of the schedule.
With respect to the monthly duty assignment, the Company sets 90 hours monthly duty time
for each cabin crew member as a standard and based on this standard 85% of the employees,
whose overtime payment ranges from 9% to 77% from their basic obligation, were found
working extra hours. Regarding the days-off consideration, each cabin crew member is
entitled to receive 6 days guaranteed days-off per month and based on this it is found that
75% of cabin crew members days-off were not considered when the schedule was prepared.
In the course of checking the equitability of the system, flight repetition was taken as a
variable and it was found that 50% of the cabin crew members were scheduled to attend 1 or
two flights repeatedly with in the given month. At last, the quality of the schedules was alsoevaluated based on the selected cabin crew members and it was found that 20% of the crew
members were scheduled to attend more than 1 flight in the same day.
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Keywords
Crew Scheduling System