Research on Irregular Flight Recovery Based on Air-Rail Spatiotemporal Network Model

The issue of irregular flight recovery has long been a significant and challenging problem for airlines, necessitating an effective program to develop recovery plans. Simultaneously, China’s high-speed rail trains, which are less sensitive to weather, have high dispatch volumes, and boast high punctuality rates, overcome the major pain points of aviation. This paper improves the traditional spatiotemporal network model by incorporating air-rail intermodal factors to study integrated recovery of irregular flights. The model aims to minimize recovery plan costs and integrates the recovery of aircraft routes and passenger itineraries. It includes practical constraints for implementing air-rail intermodal transport within the traditional model to ensure the feasibility of the generated recovery plans. To validate the proposed improved spatiotemporal network and optimization model, various delay scenarios were designed using operational data from a competition held by a large domestic airline. Commercial solvers were used to solve these scenarios, and the results demonstrated the optimization effectiveness of the model.