A Solution Method for the Maritime Pilot Scheduling Problem with Working Hour Regulations

Motivated by real needs of the industry, this paper studies a maritime pilot scheduling problem with working hour regulations. The existing traditional manual scheduling method of the targeted pilot station is actually a greedy-based approach which may lead to an extremely high operating cost solution and also some dissatisfaction of pilots. A mixed-integer programming (MIP)-based formulation is established and a variable neighborhood search (VNS) approach is proposed to solve the problem efficiently. Compared to the traditional scheduling method, the VNS approach significantly reduces the operating costs in different scales of realistic instances. At the same time, working time and working timespan of pilots are also prominently reduced, which hence directly reduce the workloads of pilots and improve their job satisfaction.