Integrated recovery of aircraft and passengers with passengers’ willingness under various itinerary disruption situations

Abstract This paper aims to study the aircraft rerouting problem considering passengers’ recovery with willingness under various itinerary disruption situation, which breaks thorough the traditional study assuming the passenger obey the airline assignment. We study how passengers’ willingness is considered in the optimization problem of aircraft rerouting and passengers’ recovery to reduce the dual losses of airlines and passengers. We consider passengers’ willingness under various itinerary disruption situations, composed of delay itineraries and disrupted itineraries. Passengers’ willingness mainly includes staying within the original itineraries, endorsing, and refunding tickets. We first construct an integer programming model with the following two objectives: to minimize airline recovery cost and reduce passenger recovery loss, and bounded rationality is applied to reformulate the passengers’ recovery loss. We then design an effective heuristic combined with multi-directional and stochastic variable neighborhood search algorithm to solve the problem. Finally, experiments based on real data are performed to show the stability and efficiency of the algorithm in various situations. Outcomes can provide theoretical and practical support for airline operations to improve passengers’ satisfaction.