A bi-objective model for aircraft and crew recovery considering individual flight legs and maintenance requirements

Abstract

This paper proposes a new bi-objective aircraft and crew recovery model. Unlike previous researches, the proposed model considers all individual flight legs in the recovery process. The objective functions minimize the recovery cost regarding crew swapping, flight cancellation, flight delay, and crew deadhead costs. Besides, the crew sit time is reduced considering the maximum legal working hours and the minimum essential rest time. Moreover, maintenance operations can be done during the ground time, not necessarily at the end of duty day. The model is never infeasible because flight cancelation is an alternative solution for recovering a schedule. A modified Tabu Search (TS) approach has been developed to solve the model. The performance of the model and solution approach is examined by several test problems in small, medium, and large scales. The results indicate that TS reaches optimal and close-optimal in a short computational time, especially in large scale problems.