Disruption management for an airline - Rescheduling of aircraft

Abstract

The Aircraft Recovery Problem (ARP) involves decisions concerning aircraft to flight assignments in situations where unforeseen events have disrupted the existing flight schedule, e.g. bad weather causing flight delays. The aircraft recovery problem aims to recover these flight schedules through a series of reassignments of aircraft to flights, delaying of flights and cancellations of flights. This article demonstrates an effective method to solve ARP. A heuristic is implemented, which is able to generate feasible revised flight schedules of a good quality in less than 10 seconds. This article is a product of the DESCARTES project, a project funded by the European Union between the Technical University of Denmark, British Airways and Carmen (see [1]). © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002.