A Hybrid Heuristics for Irregular Flight Recovery

Adverse weather conditions, congestion at airports, and mechanical failures often disrupt regular flight schedules. The irregular flight recovery problem aims to recover these schedules through reassignments of flights and cancellations. In this article, we develop the classic resource assignment model for the irregular flight recovery problem, and a new hybrid heuristic procedure based on greedy random adaptive search procedure (GRASP) and simulated annealing algorithm is presented to solve this problem. As compared with the original GRASP method, the proposed algorithm demonstrates quite a high global optimization capability. Computational experiments on large-scale problems show that the proposed procedure is able to generate feasible revised flight schedules of good quality in less than five seconds.