A column generation post-optimization heuristic for the integrated aircraft and passenger recovery problem

• We propose a post-optimization heuristic for aircraft and passenger recovery.
• The heuristic is based on column generation.
• It was applied on solutions generated with a large neighbourhood search heuristic.
• It significantly improves the solutions of the ROADEF 2009 Challenge.
• It shows that the improvements can be obtained within short computing times.

The use of hub-and-spoke networks by most major commercial airlines means that small disruptions can have a significant impact on their operational costs. These disruptions, such as delayed or cancelled flights, reduction in arrival and departure capacity, and unavailable crew or aircraft, occur frequently and when they do, airlines must recover their operations as quickly as possible. In this paper we model the joint aircraft and passenger recovery problem as a mixed integer program and we present a column generation post-optimisation heuristic to solve it. We also show how the model and the heuristic can be modified to consider passenger recovery only. The resulting heuristic improves the best known solutions for all instances of the 2009 ROADEF Challenge, within reasonable computing times.