Planning for robust airline operations : Optimizing aircraft routings and flight departure times to achieve minimum passenger disruptions

Airlines typically construct schedule plans based on the assumption that every flight leg departs and arrives as planned. Because this optimistic scenario rarely occurs, these plans are frequently disrupted and airlines often incur significant costs in addition to the originally planned costs. Flight delays and schedule disruptions also cause passenger delays and disruptions, and disrupted passengers experience very long delays and contribute to a significant amount of the total passenger delay. A more robust plan can alleviate flight and passenger delays and disruptions and their effects in the operation, and eventually reduce the operation costs. In this dissertation, we first define various robustness criteria in the context of airline schedule planning. Then we present two new approaches for robust airline schedule planning to achieve minimum passenger disruptions: Robust Aircraft Maintenance Routing, and Flight Schedule Retiming. Because each airplane usually flies a sequence of flights, delay of one flight might propagate along the aircraft route to downstream flights and cause further delays and disruptions. We propose a new approach to reduce delay propagations by intelligently routing aircraft. We formulate this problem as a mixed integer programming problem with stochastically generated inputs. An algorithmic solution approach is presented. Computational results obtained by using data from a major U.S. airline show that this approach could reduce delay propagations significantly, thus improving on-time performance and reducing passenger disruptions. Passengers miss their connections if there is not enough time for them to connect. These passengers experience very long delays. We develop a new approach to minimize the number of passenger misconnections by re-timing the departure times of flights.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2003

Author dc:creator

• Lan, Shan

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Cynthia Barnhart and John-Paul Clarke.

• Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/17568

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/17568