A Novel Rescheduling Algorithm for the Airline Recovery with Flight Priorities and Airport Capacity Constraints

Many flights experience delays at the airport due to bad weather, temporary closures of airports, unscheduled maintenance, etc., which emphasizes the urgent need for disruption management. It is widely accepted for Chinese airline companies to determine the flight timetable according to the lexicographic preference of flight priorities. Flight schedulers usually deal with the preceding flights as important as the latter flight of a higher priority. In this paper, we propose a build-in flight feasibility verification algorithm to improve the rescheduling algorithm. A novel model of the feasibility verification problem is given, which is equivalent to the model of a maximum clique problem for networks. Examples and tests show the advantage of our algorithm, and the algorithm runs fairly quickly and can be plugged in other scheduling algorithms easily.