A new tool for robust aircraft routing: Superior Robust Aircraft Routing (sup-RAR)

Abstract

Coping with uncertainty is one of the major challenges in airline operations planning. Due to its disruptive effect, researchers elaborate to build robust plans. However, it is still not clear “How to indicate a plan robust?” and “How to measure the robustness of a plan?” In order to fill these crucial gaps for robust aircraft routing sub-problem, a novel tool, which is named sup-robust aircraft routing (sup-RAR), is introduced in this study. Contribution of this new methodology is 4-dimensional: i. Producing tractable aircraft routing plans that are completely invulnerable to pre-defined uncertainties (absolutely robust AR plans); ii. Reflecting uncertainty in delay via 3 novel point of views; iii. The very first attempt in the robust airline operations planning literature to develop an evaluation framework capable of assessing even absolutely robust plans, which brings with more reliable AR plans; iv. Leading more flexible and cost-efficient decisions by enabling renting option contrary to classical robust aircraft routing models. Following the introduction, necessity for such a tool is emphasized by indicating incapabilities of previous works. Then, the proposed sup-RAR methodology is introduced. To test validity and applicability of the sup-RAR methodology, a case study comprising of real dataset is conducted. In light of the results, astonishing insights are obtained.