Using heuristics to solve the dedicated aircraft recovery problem



AbstractThe Dedicated Aircraft Recovery Problem (DARP) 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 dedicated 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 describes an effective method to solve
DARP. A heuristic is implemented, which is able to generate feasible
revised flight schedules of good quality in less than 10 seconds
when applied to real flight schedules with disruptions from British
Airways. The heuristic is able to consider delays, cancellations and
reassignments simultaneously and balance the trade-off between these
options. It is also demonstrated that different strategies can be
applied to prioritize these options when generating the revised
flight schedules without affecting the solution time required.
KeywordsDisruption management, optimization, airline Planning, Dedicated Aircraft Recovery, Heuristic, Irregular Operations
TypeTechnical report
Year2001
PublisherInformatics and Mathematical Modelling, Technical University of Denmark, DTU
AddressRichard Petersens Plads, Building 321, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby
SeriesIMM-TR-2001-18
Electronic version(s)[pdf]
BibTeX data [bibtex]
IMM Group(s)Operations Research