Integrated Disruption Management and Flight Planning to Trade off Delays and Fuel Burn

摘要

In this paper we present a novel approach addressing airline delays and recovery. Airline schedule recovery involves making decisions during operations to minimize additional operating costs while getting back on schedule as quickly as possible. The mechanisms used include aircraft swaps, flight cancelations, crew swaps, reserve crews and passenger rebookings. In this context, we introduce another mechanism, namely flight planning, which enables flight speed changes. Flight planning is the process of determining flight plan(s) specifying the route of a flight, its speed- and its associated fuel burn. Our key idea in integrating flight planning and disruption management is to adjust the speeds of flights during operations, trading off flying time and fuel burn, and combining with existing mechanisms such as flight holds; all with the goal of striking the right balance of fuel costs and passenger-related delay costs incurred by the airline. We present models for integrated aircraft and passenger recovery with flight planning, both exact and approximate. Our computational experiments on data provided by a European airline show that our approaches can achieve reductions in passenger disruptions on the order of 60-79%, accompanied by small increases in fuel burn of 0.249 - 0.254% and total cost savings of 9.0 - 9.18% for the airline. We discuss the relative benefits of two mechanisms studied - specifically, flight speed changes and intentionally holding flight departures, and show significant synergies in applying these mechanisms. The results, compared to recovery without integrated flight planning, are increased swap possibilities during recovery, decreased numbers of flight cancelations, and fewer disruptions to passengers.