Simulation for measuring the effect of flight retiming to the robustness of flight schedule

Abstract

In day-to-day operations, flight delays might happen due to some reason such as bad weather conditions, equipment failure, and limited runway capacity. Flight delays do not only increase crew operating cost, they can cause delay propagation on subsequent flights. Since the crew cost is the second largest cost, it is important to construct a robust flight schedule where any flight delay will not lead to a massive disruption to the subsequent downstream flights. In this paper, we analyze the effect of flight retiming to the robustness of flight schedule. We construct a simulation for measuring the robustness of the flight schedule, where the probability of crew pairing found after a number of flight delays happen is used as the measure of robustness. It is shown that the retiming will increase the robustness of the schedule if we only retime the flights which appear in the first cycle of the set of selected pairings.