Airline scheduling for the temporary closure of airports

The poor scheduling of flights or a fleet resulting from temporary closure of airports may cause a substantial loss of profit and decreased levels of service for airline carriers. This research develops a framework in order to help carriers handle schedule perturbations resulting from the temporary closure of airports. The framework is based on a basic model constructed as a time-space network from which several strategic network models are developed for scheduling. These network models are formulated as pure network flow problems or network flow problems with side constraints. The former are solved using the network simplex method whereas the latter are solved using a Lagrangian relaxation-based algorithm. To test how well the model may be applied in the real world, a case study regarding the international operations of a major Taiwan airline was performed. The results show that the framework could be useful in actual operations.