Express shipment pick-up and delivery : evaluating airline recovery options

Abstract

Irregular operations in the Express Shipment Service Delivery industry require real time solutions that can be implemented to determine routings for aircraft and time-sensitive commodities. During inclement weather, crew unavailability, and mechanical failures, operations personnel use various approaches to recover from disruptions, including rescheduling or canceling flight legs, diverting aircraft and commodities, or missing service all together. We present an optimization approach that can capture and evaluate the effects of different operating policies. Specifically, we compare and contrast three different strategies, namely: 1) minimizing schedule delay, 2) minimizing the number of service failures, and 3) minimizing the combined cost of operations and service failures. We provide proof of concept by implementing our optimization models and evaluating them using several representative scenarios and conducting computational experiments. The solutions, which are highly dependent on user-defined parameters, represent tradeoffs between costs of operations and service failures.