Proactive Airline Disruption Management: Increasing Schedule Robustness by Simulating Flexibility Measures

Abstract

Disruptions in airline operations significantly decrease passenger satisfaction, and have a large influence on the profits of airlines, accounting for an estimated cost of 5 to 10% of yearly revenue. At the same time, disruptions are inevitable and difficult to predict, so should be solved as efficiently as possible when they occur. Solving disruptions and restoring the network to a feasible state requires options for Operations Control of an airline. Options include reserve aircraft and crew, Free Fleet Space (FFS), or swapping opportunities. When designing the timetable, these recovery options should be built in the schedule, and this research aims to quantify the number of reserve aircraft, and the FFS required for robust operations. This was done by building a tool that simulates the effects of extra reserves end FFS. Additional FFS and reserves at the hub airport decreases the total delay times in case disruptions occur at the hub. There is no notable effect of FFS and reserves at outstations. Other airline Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) show little improvement in this research.