Disruption Management in the Airline Industry - Concepts, Models and Methods

Abstract

The airline industry is notably one of the success stories with respect to the use of optimization based methods and tools in planning. Both in planning of the assignment of available aircraft to flights and in crew scheduling, these methods play a major role. Plans are usually made several months prior to the actual day of operation. As a consequence, changes often occur in the period from the construction of the plan to the day of operation. Optimization tools play an important role also in handling these changes. However, at the day of operation, no planning tool have been able to cope with the complexity of the re-planning given that the time span for proposing a solution is only a few minutes. Numerous suggestions for such subsystems have been put forward, but today no general tool is able to handle aircraft, crew, and passenger concurrently in a single system. Currently, there is a gap between the reality faced in operations control and the decision support offered by the commercial it-systems targeting the recovery process. Though substantial achievements have been made with respect to solution methods, and hardware has become much more powerful, even the most advanced prototype systems for integrated recovery have severe limitations. The current review accounts for the majority of subsystems mentioned in the literature in terms of the sub-problem addressed and the method used in each particular contribution. For each proposed system, also the computational experiments supporting the practical usability of the system is reported