Flight rescheduling of an airline underground delay program considering delay propagation in multiple airports

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to reschedule flights for an airline's profit to correspond to the airport’s changed capacity. In the event of a ground delay program (GDP), the number of flights the airport can accommodate is reduced. We formulated a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model to reschedule flights. The MILP models were divided into two versions to handle the uncertainty of the future. In scenarios in which the GDP is changed again, an optimal model obtains solutions for each scenario. The stochastic model solution obtains a minimizing expectation cost of all scenarios. All flights are connected to both the origin and destination airports, and one aircraft may be used for more than one flight. Therefore, we considered delay propagation not only within the same airport but from other airports by extending the setup to include several airports at once. Because the objective of this study is to minimize the operation cost of airline, we also considered costs associated with airline resources such as aircrafts and crews. Related experiments were conducted including comparison between two suggested versions.