Research On Robust Aircraft Scheduling Incorporating Recovery Cost

Aircraft scheduling is an important part of airline's production plan.A reasonable flight schedule can help the airlines operate flights safely and punctually,effectively reduce the operating cost and improve the satisfaction of the passengers.However,the optimal production plan developed by the airlines is often disrupted by factors like bad weather,flow control and so on.As a result,the actual operation is not optimal as planned,and may even lead to serious flight delay,which brings huge flight recovery cost to the airlines.In order to reduce the impact of disruptions on the actual operation of airline production plan,this paper,on the basis of summarizing the commonly used aircraft scheduling optimization methods,takes the expected cost of flight recovery and the robustness of aircraft schedule into consideration,thus to propose an advanced set partitioning model for robust aircraft scheduling.In terms of the flight recovery cost,the costs of four kinds of recovery measures including delay,cancellation,aircraft swap and ferrying are discussed,and the calculation method of expected recovery cost of flight is obtained by combining the probability of these four recovery measures.In terms of robustness of flight scheduling,the delay propagation is analyzed and the robustness of aircraft scheduling is measured by the ratio of inherent delay to total delay.Finally,a dual-objective robust aircraft scheduling model is established,with the objectives of minimizing total operation cost and maximizing total robustness.The model is then constructed and solved in AIMMS.The result shows that the model can improve the robustness of aircraft scheduling effectively without much increase in the total operation cost,so that a trade-off between cost and robustness can be achieved.