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Record W4415746821 · doi:10.1016/j.cor.2025.107303

Workload balancing for flight dispatchers

2025· article· en· W4415746821 on OpenAlexafffund
Serkan Turhan, Fatma Gzara, Samir Elhedhli

Bibliographic record

VenueComputers & Operations Research · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEngineering
TopicAir Traffic Management and Optimization
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Waterloo
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
KeywordsWorkloadLagrangian relaxationGenetic algorithmHeuristicWorkstationUpper and lower boundsWork (physics)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Flight dispatchers are responsible for flight planning prior to departure and flight monitoring while en-route. Their work involves multi-tasking and their workload is dynamic. We study such a problem under two nonlinear workload balancing measures: minimum peak workload and minimum absolute deviation. In order to solve practical instances efficiently, we use decomposition through Lagrangian relaxation to reduce the problem into easier-to-solve subproblems and prove that the Lagrangian lower bound has a closed-form expression for the peak workload objective. To find feasible solutions, we develop a Focus-Search-and-Improve heuristic with a genetic algorithm core where parts of the feasible solution set are explored and searched by a genetic algorithm, and solutions are further fine-tuned by an improvement heuristic. To test the efficiency of the proposed approach, we generated 231 instances based on 2019 U.S. Bureau of Transportation flight data that involve 17 different carriers and up to 3968 flights per instance. Numerical testing demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed approach in that the Lagrangian lower bound is very tight, and the heuristic finds optimal solutions in 33.4% of the instances and are on average 3.5% away from the Lagrangian lower bound. It also reveals that the difficulty of the problem increases for smaller workstation-to-flight ratios, and that the peak workload objective achieves the goal of balancing the workload at times where peaks occur but does not necessarily balance the workload throughout the workday. On the other hand, the absolute deviation objective achieves better balance between workstations at the expense of a slight increase in peak workload. • Goal: Assign flight dispatchers to workstations to balance workload during the shift. • Means: Minimize peak workload and absolute mean deviation at every time point. • Model: MIP solved through a Focus-Search-and-Improve heuristic. • Testing: 231 instances involving 17 different carriers and up to 3968 flights per instance.

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How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: Simulation or modeling
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.931
Threshold uncertainty score0.314

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.025
GPT teacher head0.329
Teacher spread0.304 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designSimulation or modeling
Domainnot available
GenreMethods

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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