Robust Airline Schedule Planning: Minimizing Propagated Delay in an Integrated Routing and Crewing Framework

For reasons of tractability, the airline scheduling problem has traditionally been sequentially decomposed into various stages (e.g., schedule generation, fleet assignment, aircraft routing, and crew pairing), with the decisions from one stage imposed upon the decision making process in subsequent stages. Although this approach greatly simplifies the solution process, it unfortunately fails to capture the many dependencies between the various stages, most notably between those of aircraft routing and crew pairing, and how these dependencies affect the propagation of delays through the flight network. Because delays are commonly transferred between late running aircraft and crew, it is important that aircraft routing and crew pairing decisions are made together. The propagated delay may then be accurately estimated to minimize the overall propagated delay for the network and produce a robust solution for both aircraft and crew. In this paper we introduce a new approach to accurately calculate and minimize the cost of propagated delay in a framework that integrates aircraft routing and crew pairing.