Optimization-based decision support system for crew scheduling in the cruise industry

Crew members on cruise ships are hired in a global labor market, and a major cost for cruise lines is moving crew members from their home cities to the cruise ship’s departure port. Complicating the crew scheduling problem is the uncertainty due to no-shows, terminations, and other reasons for crew to terminate their contract prematurely. To address this problem, this paper describes a scheduling system that implements a two-stage planning process that first determines overbooking levels for the number of crew to offer contracts to, and then second, a goal integer programming formulation to minimize the movement cost of assigning crew to ships while maintaining adequate crew levels and a desired crew region composition. We solve actual-sized problems characteristic of the cruise industry in a reasonably short amount of time. Experiments comparing the actual crew movement costs to the system’s projected crew movement costs show that the scheduling system can consistently reduce the movement costs in the range of 9–23%, better maintain desired crew levels, and better maintain desired crew region composition.