Solving airlines disruption by considering aircraft and crew recovery simultaneously

When disruptions occur, the airlines have to recover from the disrupted schedule. The recovery usually consists of aircraft recovery, crew recovery and passengers’ recovery. This paper focuses on the integrated recovery, which means above-mentioned two or more recoveries are considered as a whole. Taking the minimization of the total cost of assignment, cancellation and delay as an objective, we present a more practical model, in which the maintenance and the union regulations are considered. Then we present a so-called iterative tree growing with node combination method. By aggregating nodes, the possibility of routings is greatly simplified, and the computation time is greatly decreased. By adjusting the consolidating range, the computation time can be controlled in a reasonable time. Finally, we use data from a main Chinese airline to test the algorithm. The experimental results show that this method could be used in the integrated recovery problem.