An Irregular Flight Scheduling Model and Algorithm under the Uncertainty Theory

The flight scheduling is a real-time optimization problem. Whenever the schedule is disrupted, it willnot only cause inconvenience to passenger, but also bring about a large amount of operational losses to airlines. Especially in case an irregular flight happens, the event is unanticipated frequently. In order to obtain an optimalpolicy in airline operations, this paper presents a model in which the total delay minutes of passengers areconsidered as the optimization objective through reassigning fleets in response to the irregular flights and which takesinto account available resources and the estimated cost of airlines. Owing to the uncertainty of the problem andinsufficient data in the decision-making procedure, the traditional modeling tool (probability theory) is abandoned,the uncertainty theory is applied to address the issues, and an uncertain programming model is developedwith the chance constraint. This paper also constructs a solution method to solve the model based on the classicalHungarian algorithm under uncertain conditions. Numerical example illustrates that the model and its algorithmare feasible to deal with the issue of irregular flight recovery