Math-heuristic to solve the airline recovery problem considering aircraft and passenger networks

The airline recovery problem involves aircraft, crew and passenger networks impacted by disruptions. Models to solve the problem consider one or more of these networks, on an integrated way or not. It belongs to the NP-hard class, even considering only one network. This work presents a math-heuristic to solve the problem integrating the aircraft and the passenger networks. A model to restore the aircraft network with minimum cost was also developed. These two models compose a framework which permits the airline to obtain the cost impact of including the passenger network in the recovery problem. Both models were tested with real world ROADEF instances using an Intel i7 microcomputer (16Gb of RAM) and a high-performance cluster node (HPC) with 512 GB of RAM. The microcomputer solved instances with up to 85 aircraft and 276 impacted flights in less than 30 minutes (imposed limit). The faster high-performance server reached solutions with minimum gap of 0 to 0.7% for the instances with higher number of flights. Total costs considering aircraft and passenger networks were very close to the aircraft network recovery results, showing a cost compensation which highlights the importance of solving the recovery problem integrating aircraft and passenger networks.