A heuristic approach based on shortest path problems for integrated flight, aircraft, and passenger rescheduling under disruptions

In this paper, we present a heuristic method to solve an airline disruption management problem arising from the ROADEF 2009 challenge. Disruptions perturb an initial flight plan such that some passengers cannot start or conclude their planned trip. The developed algorithm considers passengers and aircraft with the same priority by reassigning passengers and by creating a limited number of flights. The aim is to minimize the cost induced for the airline by the recovery from the disruptions. The algorithm is tested on real-life-based data, as well as on large-scale instances and ranks among the best methods proposed to the challenge in terms of quality, while being efficient in terms of computation time.