Approaches to incorporating robustness into airline scheduling

The airline scheduling process used by major airlines today aims to develop optimal schedules which maximize revenue. However, these schedules are often far from "optimal" once deployed in the real world because they do not accurately take into account possible weather, air traffic control (ATC), and other disruptions that can occur during operation. The resulting flight delays and cancellations can cause significant revenue loss, not to mention service disruptions and customer dissatisfaction. A novel approach to addressing this problem is to design schedules that are robust to schedule disruptions and can be degraded at any airport location or in any region with minimal impact on the entire schedule. This research project suggests new methods for creating more robust airline schedules which can be easily recovered in the face of irregular operations. We show how to create multiple optimal solutions to the Aircraft Routing problem and suggest how to evaluate robustness of those solutions. Other potential methods for increasing robustness of airline schedules are reviewed.

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

2000

Author dc:creator

• Ageeva, Yana (Yana V.), 1976-

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

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/8930

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/8930