Integrated recovery of aircraft and passengers after airline operation disruption based on a GRASP algorithm

• We propose a novel and manageable way to the integrated recovery problem of both aircraft and passengers (IRPAP).
• We try to find the optimal trade-off between passenger delay cost, passenger reassignment cost and the cost of refunding tickets.
• The model is constructed based on a flight connection network and passenger reassignment relationship.
• A heuristic algorithm is designed based on the GRASP algorithm for IRPAP.
• In the heuristic for any newly available aircraft routings, the passenger reassignment solution is then shown to be optimal for a special case.

This paper considers the integrated recovery of both aircraft routing and passengers. A mathematical model is proposed based on both the flight connection network and the passenger reassignment relationship. A heuristic based on a GRASP algorithm is adopted to solve the problem. A passenger reassignment solution is demonstrated to be optimal in each iteration for a special case. The effectiveness of the heuristic is illustrated through experiments based on synthetic and real-world datasets. It is shown that the integrated recovery of flights and passengers can decrease both the recovery cost and the number of disrupted passengers.