TY - JOUR

T1 - A novel passenger recovery approach for the integrated airline recovery problem

AU - Maher, Stephen

PY - 2015/5

Y1 - 2015/5

N2 - Schedule disruptions require airlines to intervene through the process of recovery; this involves modifications to the planned schedule, aircraft routings, crew pairings and passenger itineraries. Passenger recovery is generally considered as the final stage in this process, and hence passengers experience unnecessarily large impacts resulting from flight delays and cancellations. Most recovery approaches considering passengers involve a separately defined module within the problem formulation. However, this approach may be overly complex for recovery in many aviation and general transportation applications. This paper presents a unique description of the cancellation variables that models passenger recovery by prescribing the alternative travel arrangements for passengers in the event of flight cancellations. The results will demonstrate that this simple, but effective, passenger recovery approach significantly reduces the operational costs of the airline and increases passenger flow through the network. The integrated airline recovery problem with passenger reallocation is solved using column-and-row generation to achieve high quality solutions in short runtimes. An analysis of the column-and-row generation solution approach is performed, identifying a number of enhancement techniques to further improve the solution runtimes.

AB - Schedule disruptions require airlines to intervene through the process of recovery; this involves modifications to the planned schedule, aircraft routings, crew pairings and passenger itineraries. Passenger recovery is generally considered as the final stage in this process, and hence passengers experience unnecessarily large impacts resulting from flight delays and cancellations. Most recovery approaches considering passengers involve a separately defined module within the problem formulation. However, this approach may be overly complex for recovery in many aviation and general transportation applications. This paper presents a unique description of the cancellation variables that models passenger recovery by prescribing the alternative travel arrangements for passengers in the event of flight cancellations. The results will demonstrate that this simple, but effective, passenger recovery approach significantly reduces the operational costs of the airline and increases passenger flow through the network. The integrated airline recovery problem with passenger reallocation is solved using column-and-row generation to achieve high quality solutions in short runtimes. An analysis of the column-and-row generation solution approach is performed, identifying a number of enhancement techniques to further improve the solution runtimes.

KW - Airline recovery

KW - Passenger recovery

KW - Column generation

KW - Row generation

U2 - 10.1016/j.cor.2014.11.005

DO - 10.1016/j.cor.2014.11.005

M3 - Journal article

VL - 57

SP - 123

EP - 137

JO - Computers and Operations Research

JF - Computers and Operations Research

SN - 0305-0548

ER -