Solving Multiple Fleet Airline Disruption Problems Using a Distributed-Computation Approach to Integer Programming

The execution of the airline operation is often deviated from the original schedule due to some unexpected disruptions, such as aircraft breakdowns and severe weather conditions. In this situation, a recovery plan is needed to get the irregular operation back to normal to minimize the losses of the airline. To produce recovery plans and solve the airline disruption problems, a novel modified traveling salesman problem model is proposed to generate sets of the feasible flight routes for each aircraft fleet type. Then, the feasible flight routes are reassigned to the available aircrafts in each fleet to form a recovery plan. Numerical results show that the approach proposed in this paper is efficient and promising.