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.