Murat Yavuz

Date of Award

3-10-2010

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Department of Operational Sciences

First Advisor

James T. Moore, PhD

Abstract

Fighter squadrons in the Turkish Air Force build flight schedules for weekly periods. This process requires a great deal of time and does not seek optimality. Schedules are built with feasibility concerns. The Turkish Air Force doesn’t have an automated tool for flight scheduling. Many constraints including crew rest, number of sorties flown in a month, and duty currencies affect the schedule. Providing an automated scheduling tool may help schedulers save time for other squadron tasks including mission preparation, briefing, and debriefing. In this research, a heuristic approach to the problem is developed. Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedures (GRASP) is applied to the weekly pilot scheduling problem. Manual scheduler inputs are allowed. A code for GRASP implementation is written in MATLAB. Two different approaches are used in the analysis. First, the code is run for four weekly schedules taken from an F-16 squadron of the Turkish Air Force and second, a weekly flight schedule is created randomly. In the second approach, the created flight schedule is used for three different scenarios which represent possible real life situations. For all scenarios and real schedules, GRASP performed well and smaller standard deviations in sortie numbers are obtained while keeping all pilots within the currency limit of each mission.

AFIT Designator

AFIT-OR-MS-ENS-10-11

DTIC Accession Number

ADA516954

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