Disruption management in the airline industry



AbstractDisruption management in the airline industry involves decisions concerning crew and aircraft assignments in situations where unforeseen events have disrupted the existing flight schedules, e.g. bad weather causing flight delays. Disruption management aims to recover these flight schedules through a series of reassignments of crew and aircraft.

The first part of this thesis concentrates on disruption management where only aircraft assignments are changed -- the Dedicated Aircraft Recovery Problem. A heuristic is implemented which can generate revised flight schedules of a good quality in less than 5 seconds on average when applied to 25 different flight schedules with disruptions.

In the second part of the thesis, an outline of an extended heuristic is given. Here disruption management includes the possibility of both aircraft and crew reassignments - the Integrated Crew and Aircraft Recovery Problem. The outline presents a detailed description of how to construct such a heuristic.

Throughout all the work presented here, the focus has been to develop methods which are simple, flexible and fast.
Keywordsdisruption management, optimization, airline planning, heuristic
TypeMaster's thesis [Academic thesis]
Year2001
PublisherInformatics and Mathematical Modelling, Technical University of Denmark, DTU
AddressRichard Petersens Plads, Building 321, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby
SeriesIMM-EKS-2001-16
Electronic version(s)[pdf]
BibTeX data [bibtex]
IMM Group(s)Operations Research