Airline Disruptions: Aircraft Recovery with Maintenance Constraints

In this paper we consider the recovery of an airline schedule after an unforeseen event, commonly called disruption, that makes the planned schedule unfeasible. In particular we consider the aircraft recovery problem for an heterogeneous fleet of aircrafts, made of regular and reserve planes, where the maintenance constraints are explicitly taken into account. We propose a multicommodity network flow model, where each commodity represents a plane, a dynamic programming algorithm to build the underlying network and an heuristic algorithm based on column generation. We provide some computational results on instances obtained from a medium-sized airline.