Approaches to incorporating robustness into airline scheduling

Abstract

The airline scheduling process used by major airlines today aims to develop optimal schedules which maximize revenue. However, these schedules are often far from "optimal" once deployed in the real world because they do not accurately take into account possible weather, air traffic control (ATC), and other disruptions that can occur during operation. The resulting flight delays and cancellations can cause significant revenue loss, not to mention service disruptions and customer dissatisfaction. A novel approach to addressing this problem is to design schedules that are robust to schedule disruptions and can be degraded at any airport location or in any region with minimal impact on the entire schedule. This research project suggests new methods for creating more robust airline schedules which can be easily recovered in the face of irregular operations. We show how to create multiple optimal solutions to the Aircraft Routing problem and suggest how to evaluate robustness of those solutions. Other potential methods for increasing robustness of airline schedules are reviewed.