Heuristics for airline schedule recovery via the virtual hub model

Airlines incur significant additional costs when bad weather at a hub-airport causes delays and cancellations throughout their entire network. One new recovery strategy called the virtual hub alleviates the effects of large delays at a hub-airport by setting up and diverting flight legs to nearby virtual-hub-airports. The effectiveness of the virtual hub strategy is tested through simulated days using the MIT Extensible Airport Network Simulator (MEANS). Increasingly complex heuristics are implemented to perform the virtual hub. Results indicate that the virtual hub recovery strategy can reduce the number of passengers going through the hub that get abandoned by 38.0%, the number going through the hub with significant delays by 30.4%, and the average flight leg delay of the airline can be reduced by 49.5%. The heuristics are able to produce effective solutions in a matter of a few minutes.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• Loy, Jason A. (Jason Andrew), 1980-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• John-Paul Clarke.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

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

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/28434

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/28434