Flight Scheduling for Airport Closure Based on Sequential Decision

To solve the problem of flight recovery after temporary closure of airport, a new scheduling method was presented, which provides new ideas for real-time flight recovery. With redefining recovery operations, this paper transforms the large scale flight planning problem with complex constraints into a simple sequential decision problem. Using the original flight schedules as a draft, the conflicts with the airport traffic flow constraint are resolved in chronological order. At each decision time, the flight delay costs are calculated with reasoning, and the high-cost flights are prioritized for taking off or landing. Test cases show that the new method can fast recover the multi-fleet airline schedules after the temporary closure of busy airport.