An Optimization Approach to Airline Integrated Recovery

While the airline industry has benefited from advancements made in advanced analytical OR methods, most products used in operation stem from the frictionless environment of the planning stage. With 22% of all flights being delayed and 3% being canceled in the U.S. since 2001, schedule perturbations are inevitable. The complexity of the operational environment is exacerbated by the need for obtaining a solution in as close to real-time as possible. Given some time horizon, the recovery process seeks to repair the flight schedule, aircraft rotations, crew schedule, and passenger itineraries in a tractable manner. Each component individually can be difficult to solve, so early research on irregular operations has studied these problems in isolation leading to a sequential process by which the recovery process is conducted. Recent work has integrated a subset of these four components, usually abstracting from crew recovery. We present an optimization-based approach to solve the airline integrated recovery problem. After our solution methodology is presented, it is tested using data from an actual U.S. carrier with a dense flight network. It is shown that in several instances an integrated solution is delivered in a reasonable runtime. Moreover we present results showing the integrated approach can substantially improve the solution quality over the incumbent sequential approach. To the best of our knowledge, are the first to present computational results on the fully integrated airline recovery problem.