Solving long haul airline disruption problem caused by groundings using a distributed fixed-point computational approach to integer programming

Disruptions are prevalent phenomenons that prevent airline from operating as original scheduled. This paper adopts the iterative fixed-point method for integer programming proposed by Dang and Ye [1] to generate feasible flight routes that are used to construct an aircraft reassignment in response to the grounding of one aircraft. Two division methods are proposed with which the solution space can be divided into several independent segments and implemented a distributed computation. The second division method is emphasized in this paper for the good performance of partial feasible flight routes which are generated by this division approach. Comparison with CPLEX CP Optimizer [2] shows that less partial feasible flight routes which are generated by Dang's algorithm [1] are required to find an aircraft reassignment when disruptions happen, and this division method is more promising when dealing with long haul airline disruption problem.