A multi-fidelity modelling approach for airline disruption management using simulation

Abstract

Disruption is a serious and common problem for the airline industry. High utilisation of aircraft and airport resources mean that disruptive events can have large knock-on effects for the rest of the schedule. The airline must rearrange their schedule to reduce the impact. The focus in this paper is on the Aircraft Recovery Problem. The complexity and uncertainty involved in the industry makes this a difficult problem to solve. Many deterministic modelling approaches have been proposed, but these struggle to handle the inherent variability in the problem. This paper proposes a multi-fidelity modelling framework, enabling uncertain elements of the environment to be included within the decision making process. We combine a deterministic integer program to find initial solutions and a novel simulation optimisation procedure to improve these solutions. This allows the solutions to be evaluated whilst accounting for the uncertainty of the problem. The empirical evaluation suggests that the combination consistently finds good rescheduling options.

Reassigning Departure Slots with Preferences of the Airline and Passengers

“…Constraint-Handling Procedure. Following algorithm initialization, to ensure that the solutions of the generated individuals are feasible, check each individual to determine whether there are repeated individuals in the population, for example, the departure flight recovery plan for both individuals is (3-1-2-4-5-6-7-8), and individuals who violate constraints (8) and (9), that is, x ij (s j À r i )\0 or x ij (s j À r i ).t max , 8i 2 I, 8j 2 J . If the individuals in the above situation appear in the population, select the individuals in the population which violate the conditions to regenerate until all the individuals in the population meet the constraints in the problem.…”

“…The disrupted flight schedule recovery can be further divided into arrival flight schedule recovery and departure flight schedule recovery. Given the rapid development of air transportation and the serious situation of flight delays, the airline disruption recovery has attracted much research in recent years ( 5 – 8 ). However, when it comes to the flight schedule recovery, research on the issue of the planned recovery of departure flights has not been sufficiently studied.…”