A flight-leg-based crew recovery model for disruptions management: A Tabu Search approach

Airlines face severe challenges due to various types of flight disruptions, such as natural disasters, bad weather, technical issues, or crew absence, which the flight recovery process can alleviate their adverse effects. This paper proposes a new flight-leg-based Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model for crew recovery, which differs from existing string-based models. Prior string-based crew recovery models only recover the disrupted flight string(s), which this method does not guarantee an optimal solution and minimum recovery cost. However, the new proposed model addresses this challenge by recovering all flight schedules after disruption, ensuring the minimum crew recovery cost. In the proposed model, crew members' minimum sitting time, the maximum daily flight hours, and the maximum number of daily flights they can handle are also considered, effectively minimizing recovery costs compared to prior models. Delay and cancellation have been employed as two popular recovery policies. This problem is clearly always feasible, as it can cancel all flights in the worst case. This flight-leg-based model is tested on different scenarios with small, medium, and large scales and solved by Tabu Search (TS) as well as CPLEX in GAMS software. Results demonstrate that this flight-leg-based model can generate optimal recovery costs under all legal constraints with fast computational time.

کلیدواژه ها:

Airline recovery ، airline disruption management ، crew recovery model ، flight-leg-based model ، recovery cost minimization ، Tabu-search