Solving the flight perturbation problem with meta heuristics

When there is a perturbation in a carefully constructed aircraft schedule, e.g. an aircraft breakdown, it is important to minimize the negative consequences of this disturbance. Here, a tabu search and a simulated annealing approach to the flight perturbation problem are presented. The heuristics use a tree-search algorithm to find new schedules for the aircraft, and utilize a path relinking strategy to explore paths between structurally different solutions. The computational results indicate that the solution strategies, especially the tabu search, can be successfully used to solve the flight perturbation problem.