Planning and Control of Transportation Systems: Robust Airline Planning

摘要

Airline operations are made up of many interdependent components. Both aircraftand crews are limited and costly resources. Aircraft are subject to strict maintenance rules; crews must follow complex FAA and union restrictions. Coupled together, they form a complex network over which passengers flow. Each planning decision, such as, the departure time of a flight, the type of aircraft flow, the pairing of flights for direct flights, can have a dramatic impact on other aspects of the system. Decisions are usually made with the expectation that they will cover an extended period where each day has the same schedule and fleeting. In reality, this is rarely the case. In addition to planned deviations (for example, additional flights in business markets on busier days of the week), there is a vast array of unplanned daily deviations. These range from a crowded flight needing a few extra unplanned minutes to load and unload passengers, to weather-induced ground holds which may significantly delay departures of a large number of flights, to an aircraft being grounded for unplanned maintenance, to a crew memeber not being available for his or her planned flight. Deviations such as these can ripple throughout the system, causing wide-spread disruptions. The authors look at how robustness may be measured and incorporated in the airline planning phase. The authors' focus is on the fleet assignment problem, with some limited schedule adjustment. The authors focus on three different areas including the identification of metrics to measure how operations deviate from the plan and how this impacts the rest of the system; the development of tools for comparing different plans given the same scenario of operational conditions; and the existence of alternative approaches to the fleet assignment problem that encourage robustness.