Sparse-Dense Flight Copy-Based Interactive Mechanism for Airline Integrated Recovery

Abstract

Flight recovery, aircraft rerouting, and passenger reallocation are critical in airline recovery. To preserve their interdependence that is neglected by the regular sequential recovery, we consider these recovery phases from an integration perspective. In addition, we incorporate cruise speed control to enhance the recovery performance. While using flight copies is a common modelling method in airline disruption management, the resulting integrated mathematical model is challenging to solve in real time due to the large number of flight copies, especially when considering cruise speed control. This paper introduces a new sparse-dense flight copy approach and proposes an innovative interactive mechanism that alternately adjusts aircraft routes on the sparse flight copy-based network and reallocates passenger itineraries on the dense flight copy-based network. Under the interactive mechanism, the involved sparse and dense networks are much smaller than those in the conventional flight copy approach. To implement such a mechanism, we develop an integrated flight, aircraft, and passenger recovery model (IFAPRM) and propose a customized Benders decomposition (CBD) to solve the model. Besides, we further propose some acceleration techniques to speed up the CBD method, including an effective feasibility certificate, scale management, and valid inequalities. Computational experiments on real-world data demonstrate that the sparse-dense flight copy-based interactive mechanism outperforms the conventional flight copy approach. In essence, the proposed interactive mechanism, along with its corresponding modelling method, algorithm, and acceleration techniques, provides a comprehensive methodology and a general decision-support framework for integrated rescheduling problems in complex operations, with potential applications in logistics, transportation, and beyond.