A Rapid Solving Method to Large Airline Disruption Problems Caused by Airports Closure

Airline disruption is universal phenomenon that block the originally scheduled flights, and the slow recovery scheduling causes a lot of losses to both the airline companies and the passengers. However, it is very difficult to generate a new recovery scheduling in a reasonable time by traditional methods, especially for large dimension airline disruption problem. To deal with this problem rapidly, the airline disruption problem will be reformulated as integer programmings and a distributed network, which is based on the fixed-point iterative method for integer programming, will be developed in this paper. In response to the airport closure, an airplane reschedule is constructed by these feasible flight lines. In the implementation of distributed network, a certain number of independent segments are obtained by dividing the solution space. As a feature of this fixed-point method, the number of partial feasible flight lines, which have to be calculated for finding an optimized airplane reschedule, is much fewer compared with the number needed by CPLEX CP Optimizer. This is the first distributed integer programming method to large airline disruption problems caused by airports closure. In the numerical results, the proposed distributed approach shows promising, especially for solving the large dimension airline disruption problem.