Game-theoretic analysis of the impact of crew overnight hotel cost on airlines’ fleet assignment and crew pairing

Crew costs account for a high proportion of the total operational costs of an airline. The cost of overnight stay for the crew at a hotel is an important additional cost. To address this problem, this study establishes an integrated model to depict the interaction between the fleet assignment problem and the crew pairing problem. Because this cost is largely determined by the price agreed by the agreement hotel group, we further present a Stackelberg price game model to capture the interdependence between the integrated fleet assignment and crew pairing of airlines and the price game among hotel groups that provide accommodation services for airlines. We combine the idle time re-allocation with a spatio-temporal graph convolutional network to ensure the robustness of crew pairing. The solvability of the model is improved using the Reformulation-Linearization Technique. To obtain the overall Nash equilibrium of the Stackelberg price game model, we design a heuristic algorithm based on a decomposition algorithm and a proximity search algorithm. A case study is made to demonstrate that our robust model is cost-saving for the airline.