A DECISION-SUPPORT FRAMEWORK FOR HANDLING SCHEDULE PERTURBATION

Perturbations of flight schedules may occur everyday. Poor scheduling of flights may result in a substantial loss of profit and decreased le vels of service for air carriers. This research aims at developing a f ramework to help carriers in handling schedule perturbations caused by the breakdown of aircraft. The framework is based on a basic schedule perturbation model constructed as a dynamic network from which severa l perturbed network models are developed for scheduling following inci dents. These network models are formulated as pure network flow proble ms or network how problems with side constraints. The former are solve d using the network simplex method while the latter are solved using L agrangian relaxation with subgradient methods. To show how to apply th e framework in the real world, a case study focusing on the operations of a major Taiwan air carrier in East Asia is presented. Copyright (C ) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd