A Necessity for Sustainability: Operational Resilience Through Disruption Management in Airlines

Abstract

AbstractIn today’s turbulent, complex, ever-growing, global system organizations face various challenges such as terrorist attacks, pandemic diseases, natural disasters, economic recession, human error, equipment failure, besides minor disruptions. These challenges pose severe threat to the operational continuity of organizations. This vulnerability brings resilience forward as an important issue since it is a necessary precondition for sustainability. Air transportation, which is one of the crucial components of this global system, has also widened its network while gaining more and more importance every day. Due to its scale and complexity, it has also become more vulnerable to disruptions caused by internal and external factors such as weather conditions, strikes, political reasons, aircraft mechanical problems, sickness of crew. These factors can break operational continuity of airlines—one of the main components of air transportation—by causing flight disruptions. A single flight disruption may trigger a snowball effect causing delays or even cancellations on several other flights legs. As today, most of the large airlines serve on a tight hub-and-spoke network, a single glitch in a hub can swiftly affect the whole schedule of an airline. Considering that the notable growth in air transportation has resulted in congested airports and airspace, serving on a large network with limited resources can easily contribute to the propagation of each disruption, costing airlines billions of dollars each year. Thus, effective disruption management is crucial for airlines, as it aims to predict the occurrence of disruptions and to find feasible plans, considering the costs, that allow the airline to recover from these disruptions and their associated delays. In the scope of disruption management, robust and dynamic operational research methodologies have gained popularity. However, due to high system complexity, disruption management is usually covered in different problems such as robust aircraft scheduling, robust crew scheduling, aircraft recovery, crew recovery, and passenger recovery problems. In this context, this chapter, first, briefly presents the concept of resilience and sustainability and introduces the airline operations and scheduling process. Afterwards, it provides detailed information on airline disruption management along with studies in the existing literature and methods used during the process.KeywordsSustainabilityResilienceAirline planning and schedulingAirline disruption managementAirline recovery problemRobust airline scheduling