AIRCREWSCHED: A meta review of aircrew scheduling and its research challenges

Aircrew scheduling is an important part of the aviation industry. As airline networks expand and operational models evolve, crew scheduling becomes more complex and challenging, requiring the development and application advanced optimization techniques. Given the diverse nature of this field, covering aspects of air transport management, computer science, and operations research, synthesizing the state of the art and identify important research gaps, is often problematic. In this study, we provide a meta review on survey and overview papers in the field. As part of our comprehensive dissection of the extant literature, we introduce the AIRCREWSCHED framework, which encapsulates twelve essential research challenges that have emerged through our meta review on aircrew scheduling, covering, among others, aspects of artificial intelligence, integration, resource sharing mechanisms, crew individuality, and sustainability considerations. We believe that our meta review aids the community to make orchestrated efforts in advancing aircrew scheduling.