Planning for Robust Airline Operations: Optimizing Aircraft Routings and Flight Departure Times to Minimize Passenger Disruptions

Airline schedules are typically developed assuming every flight will depart and arrive as planned, a scenario that rarely happens. Airlines incur significant expenses because of these flight delays, schedule disruptions, and passenger delays. A more robust plan can reduce the occurrence and impact of these delays, thereby reducing costs. This paper presents two new approaches to minimize passenger disruptions, one involving aircraft routing and the other involving retiming flight departure times. Because aircraft usually fly a sequence of flight legs, a delay in one leg propagates through the system and causes further delays downstream, and the authors suggest a new approach by intelligently routing aircraft using an algorithmic approach. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer programming problem with stochastically generated inputs. Data from a major U.S. airline show that this approach can reduce delay propagation, improve on-time performance, and reduce passenger disruptions. The second approach involves passengers who miss connecting flights due to insufficient connection time, and the authors show that retiming flight departures within a small time window can significantly reduce those missed connections without significantly increasing airline costs.

• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/oclc/1767714
• Authors:
  • Lan, Shan
  • Clarke, John-Paul
  • Barnhart, Cynthia
• Publication Date: 2006-2

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Print
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: pp 15-28
• Serial:
  • Transportation Science
  • Volume: 40
  • Issue Number: 1
  • Publisher: Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
  • ISSN: 0041-1655
  • Serial URL: http://transci.journal.informs.org/

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Airlines; Arrivals and departures; Departure time; Flight delays; Mixed integer programming; Passengers; Routes and routing; Schedules and scheduling
• Uncontrolled Terms: Aircraft routing; Connecting flights; On-time arrival; Robustness (Algorithms); Scheduling delays
• Subject Areas: Aviation; Economics; Passenger Transportation;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01023477
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Apr 28 2006 8:11AM