Spectral Clustering Approximation For Large Scale Crew Disruption Data Of An Airline Company For Intelligent Crew Recovery

In the airline industry, after fuel costs, the crew costs constitute airlines’ second-highest cost items. For this reason, an airline needs to manage the valuable crew resource efficiently. Deviations from plans are fact in airline business and fixing deviations from crew schedules that occurred during operations by minimizing the crew-related delays and associated costs is one of the most important operational burdens of airlines. In this context, the analysis of crew disruption data is vital in order to find disruption characteristics. Clustering analysis is one of the key methods for analyzing the disruption characteristics. In this context, although there have been satisfactory studies in the literature and applications in the industry for small and medium-sized airlines, there is no good solution or industry practice for airlines with extensive networks and fleets. This study aims to analyze and categorize large-scale crew disruption data of a European airline. The relationship between categories of crew disruption and variables such as flight and crew types etc., are determined, and the disruption characteristics are revealed. For this purpose, clusters hidden in the large data set are extracted by spectral clustering. Due to the large size of the input data, a new approximation approach for spectral clustering is introduced. With the help of this new approximation approach, spectral clustering techniques are applied within a limited computational power and time frame as most real world scenario require. Even if the data set is gathered from one airline, the characteristics that are derived from the data is representing most of the cases an airline may face today. and will serve as a basis for further estimation and analysis of crew disruption.