Disruption Recovery at Airports: Ground Holding, Curfew Restrictions and an Approximation Algorithm

Abstract

We study disruptions at a major airport. Disruptions could be caused by bad weather, for example. Our study is from the perspective of the airport, the air services provider (such as air traffic control) and the travelling public, rather than from the perspective of a single airline. Disruptions cause flights to be subjected to ground holding, or they cause the flights to violate airport curfew hours. We consider curfew and arrival capacities applicable at a single airport. After proving that the problem is NP-hard, we present a polynomial time approximation algorithm based on the primal–dual schema and show that if the problem is feasible, the algorithm finds a feasible solution that is both within a certain additive bound and within a certain multiplicative factor of the optimal solution. The algorithm returns a solution mix of which flights suffer no delay, which ones to be ground-held and which ones may violate the curfew (and hence pay a curfew penalty). Computational results are positive; our heuristic outperforms the integer programming solver by a wide margin.