The aircraft recovery problem: A systematic literature review

Events that cause disruptions to air company flight schedules transporting passengers and cargo are common-place in practice, and their operational and financial consequences are often relevant. The aircraft recovery problem (ARP) consists of recovering the flight schedules lost due to such events, determining new flight departure times and possible flight cancellations, as well as revising routes for different aircraft. In this study, the main characteristics considered in ARP papers to make the problem as realistic as possible are identified and a systematic literature review is carried out based on seminal studies of the problem in the 1980s. The literature papers are reviewed in terms of the ARP variants studied, the objectives chosen to be optimized and the practical constraints most often considered in real applications, as well as the networks and mathematical formulations to represent the problem and the solution approaches used to deal with it. The aim is to present an up-to-date review of the state-of-the-art of the ARP and to identify possible literature gaps and interesting opportunities for future research on this problem. It is noteworthy that, compared to the simplicity of the first ARP studies, the studies of the following decades tended to involve more complex variants of the problem as a way to become more adherent to current practical environments, requiring more elaborate formulations and solution methods to be properly addressed.