Optimal dispatching strategy on an airline network after a schedule perturbation

It often happens that one or more aeroplanes from an airline fleet are taken out of operation for technical reasons and the airline has to operate on the existing network with a reduced number of planes. This paper presents the results of an effort to define a new ad hoc schedule for this situation, so that the total passenger delay on an airline network is minimized. A network is formed, in which nodes represent flights on a given airline network, and arcs are the total time losses on individual flights. The problem of determining a new routing and scheduling plan for the airline fleet is solved by branch and-bound methods. A numerical example illustrates the efficiency of the model.