An abductive-based scheduler for air-crew assignment

This article presents the design and implementation of an air-crew assignme nt system, for producing and refining a solution to this problem, based on the artificial intelligence principles and techniques of abductive reasonin g as captured by the framework of abductive logic programming (ALP). The sy stem offers a high level of flexibility in addressing both the tasks of cre w scheduling and rescheduling. It can be used to generate a valid and good quality initial solution and then help the human operators adjust and refin e further this solution in order to meet extra requirements of the problem. These additional needs can arise either due to new foreseen requirements t hat the company wants to have or experiment with for a particular period in time, or due to unexpected events that have occurred while the solution (c rew-roster) is in operation. This work shows the ability and flexibility of abduction, and, more specifically, of ALP, in tackling problems of this ty pe with complex and changing requirements.