IRREGULAR OPERATIONS

(SCHEDULE RECOVERY AND

ROBUSTNESS)

Lecture # 5
HIGHLIGHTS
• Introduction

• Irregular Operations
• Schedule Recovery of Irregular Operations

• Robust Airline Scheduling

INTRODUCTION
• The optimized aircraft and crew schedules generated using approaches
if ever, implemented exactly as planned on a daily basis. Impeding their
implementation are two major sources of disruption:
1. Airline resource shortages caused by aircraft mechanical
problems, crew unavailability due to illness or upstream missed
connections or delays, aircraft delays caused by lack of gates or other
ground resources, longer than expected passenger boarding and
disembarking times.
2. Airport and airspace capacity shortages caused by factors such
as airport security delays and inclement weather conditions that reduce
throughput at airports
• These disruptions often result in irregular operations in which the needed
resources, such as crews, aircraft, gates and landing slots, become
unavailable and the planned schedule becomes inoperable. To respond
to these disruptions as they occur, airlines operate control centers at
which controllers, who are provided with up-to-the-minute information
about the network-wide status of the airline’s operations, make decisions
regarding how to reassign resources and adjust the flight schedule in a
manner that best repairs the disrupted schedules and allows the airline
to resume planned operations.

IRREGULAR OPERATIONS
• The employment relationship encompasses the broad range of ways
in which firms interact with employees to set the terms of employment
(e.g., wages) and to communicate and coordinate the work to be
performed. Identifying a few major dimensions of this relationship and
some basic alternative approaches to addressing those dimensions
will help set the context for the chapter.
• At a conceptual level, the employment relationship can be segmented
into three tiers of interaction: workplace; collective bargaining; and
strategic decision making
• The first tier encompasses the way in which employees and
managers interact on a day-to-day basis and is the primary sphere of
many HR approaches, policies and programs.
• In the control model, the interaction between managers and
employees is hierarchical and management acts unilaterally.
Employees are expected to comply with management’s orders, but
are not expected to go above and beyond in exercising initiative on
behalf of the company. In the commitment model, managers consult
more with employees on decisions and allow employees more
discretion in the execution of their jobs.

REGULATION & SCHEDULING

• These network effects are exacerbated, and disruption levels are
elevated by two major factors:
1. Airline schedules are optimized under an assumption of normal
weather and other operating conditions, with nonproductive or
slack time largely stripped from the schedule to maximize
resource productivity, thus providing little opportunity to absorb
unexpected delays, which, thus, propagate throughout the network.
2. Unlike air traffic demand growth, capacity growth at many of
the world’s congested airports is stagnant.
• The direct (aircraft) operating costs of schedule delays in 2007 were
estimated at about $8 billion with additional estimated passenger
delay costs of about $4 billion per year. With the airline industry
 suffering tremendous losses in recent years, as discussed coupled
with the current threat to profitability brought about by soaring fuel
costs, it is imperative that airlines manage these disruptions
effectively to control the costs of irregular operations

AIRLINE OPERATIONS CONTROL CENTERS

• Airlines operate Airline Operations Control Centers (AOCCs) to: (1) ensure safety
of operations; (2) exchange information with Air Navigation Service
providers and other airlines; (3) manage aircraft, crew and passenger
operations; and (4) recover from irregular operations.
• The AOCC comprises:
• Airline operations controllers who, at the helm of the AOCC, are responsible for
aircraft rerouting, and for decisions on flight cancellations, ground delays and
diversions for various types of aircraft.
• Crew planners who find efficient recovery solutions for crews and coordinate with
airline operations controllers to ensure that considered operational decisions are
feasible with respect to crews.
• Customer service coordinators who find efficient recovery solutions for
passengers and coordinate with airline operations controllers to provide an
assessment of the impact on passengers of possible operational decisions.
• Dispatchers who provide flight plans and relevant information to pilots.
• An air traffic control group that collects and provides information, such as the
likelihood of future ground delay programs, to airline operations controllers.

OPTIONS FOR SCHEDULE RECOVERY

FROM IRREGULAR OPS
When disruptions occur airline controllers adjust scheduled operations
by:

1. Delaying flight departures until aircraft and/or crews are ready;

2. Cancelling flight legs;
3. Rerouting or swapping aircraft (i.e., reassigning aircraft among a
subset of flight legs);
4. Calling in new crews or reassigning existing crews;
5. Postponing the departure times of flight legs to prevent connecting
passengers from missing their connections; and
6. Re accommodating disrupted passengers, i.e., passengers who
must be re accommodated
7. On itineraries other than planned, due to flight leg cancellations or
missed connections caused by flight leg delays.
 SCHEDULE RECOVERY FROM IRREGULAR
OPS (OBJECTIVES / PROCESS
Schedule recovery plans try to achieve one or more of a set of possible
objectives, such as:
• Minimizing the cost of reserve crews and spare aircraft used;
• Minimizing passenger recovery costs, minimizing loss of passenger goodwill
• Minimizing the amount of time until it is possible to resume the original plan.
Whatever the objective, the recovery problem must often be solved within a limited
number of minutes, otherwise the recovery solution can become infeasible. This time
limitation renders it impractical to solve large, detailed optimization models and
hence, to meet these objectives.
Most airline recovery processes are sequential:
• The first step is to recover aircraft, making decisions involving flight leg
cancellations, delays and aircraft re routings.
• The second step is to determine crew recovery plans, assigning crews to
uncovered flight legs by reassigning them or utilizing reserve crews.
• The third step is to develop passenger re accommodation plans for disrupted
passengers.
 AIRCRAFT SWAPPING
• Operations controllers can also swap aircraft of different types although
several conditions must be satisfied before making such swaps.
• First, to leave crew schedules intact, pilots must be able to operate the
aircraft types to which they are reassigned.
• Second, because different aircraft types are likely to have different
numbers of seats, resulting passenger disruption costs must be
outweighed by the benefits of swapping.
• Third, all swaps must allow aircraft maintenance requirements to be
satisfied. Not withstanding these restrictions, numerous swap
opportunities often exist, especially for large airlines at a hub airport,
where typically many aircraft will be on the ground at the same time.

SCHDULE RECOVERY (OBJECTIVES /

PROCESS)
• Schedule recovery plans try to achieve one or more of a set of possible
objectives, such as:
• Minimizing the cost of reserve crews and spare aircraft used;
• Minimizing passenger recovery costs;
• Minimizing loss of passenger goodwill;
• Minimizing the amount of time until it is possible to resume the
original plan.
• Whatever the objective, the recovery problem must often be solved within
a limited number of minutes, otherwise the recovery solution can become
infeasible, to meet these objectives, most airline recovery processes are
sequential.
• The first step is to recover aircraft, making decisions involving flight leg
cancellations, delays and aircraft re routings.
• The second step is to determine crew recovery plans, assigning crews
to uncovered flight legs by reassigning them or utilizing reserve crews.
• Finally, the third step is to develop passenger re-accommodation plans
for disrupted passengers.

AIRCRAFT RECOVERY
• When schedule disruptions occur, the aircraft recovery problem is to
determine flight departure times and cancellations, and revised routings
for affected aircraft. Rerouting options include: ferrying (repositioning an
aircraft containing no passengers to another location, where it can be
 utilized); diverting (flying to an airport other than the scheduled
destination); and most commonly, swapping. Each modification must
satisfy maintenance requirements, station departure curfew restrictions
and aircraft balance requirements, especially at the start and end of the
recovery period.
• Delay propagation (no aircraft rerouting)
• Aircraft swapping (aircraft rerouting)
• Flight cancellations

• Flight delays are not necessarily indicative of the magnitude of delays

experienced by disrupted passengers.
• Delays suffered by disrupted passengers and the associated costs
account for a very significant part of total passenger delays, even when
the number of disrupted passengers is relatively small.
CREW RECOVERY
Although aircraft recovery decisions repair disrupted aircraft schedules,
they often result in the disruption of crews. Flight cancellations, delays,
diversion and swap decisions, together with crew illness, all result in
the unavailability of crews at the locations needed.
1. One recovery option is deadheading crew members (i.e.,
repositioning crew members by flying them as passengers) from
their point of disruption to the location of a later flight leg to which
they are assigned Once repositioned, a crew can then resume its
original work schedule.
2. Another option is to assign a reserve crew to cover the flight legs
left unassigned, or open, by the crew disruption. Using reserve
crews can be quite costly, however, because it can entail payment
to both the reserve crew and the replaced crew. Airlines often must
pay the replaced crew the entire amount originally planned, even if
the work is performed by a different crew.
3. A third recovery option is to reassign a crew from its original
schedule to an alternative schedule.
PASSENGER RECOVERY
• Just as aircraft recovery decisions can result in crew disruptions,
aircraft and crew recovery decisions can lead to passenger
disruptions. (Recall that a disrupted passenger is a passenger who,
due to flight cancellations or missed connections caused by flight
delays, must be re accommodated on a different itinerary than
planned.)
• The extent of the resulting passenger delay is a function of the
number of alternative itineraries between the origins and destinations
of the cancelled flights, the number of passengers disrupted by the
cancellations and the number of available seats on these alternative
itineraries.
• Passengers, who cannot be accommodated the next day can be
delayed to subsequent days, until the inventory of empty seats meets
the backlog of disrupted passengers. In this example, it is clear that
the cancellation option has large associated passenger costs, and,
hence, it would be implemented only if the constraints and costs
associated with other considerations, such as aircraft or crew,
dominate.

DELAY COST OF RECOVERY

• The delay cost of a recovery action, such as delay propagation,

aircraft swapping or cancellation, must be an inclusive estimate of:
• The aircraft-related costs imparted, including those involving
maintenance and aircraft repositioning if necessary, to all aircraft as a
result of the recovery action;
• The crew-related delay costs associated with the delays, crew
reassignments and repositioning, and the use of reserve crew
members; and
• The passenger-related costs associated with delays and resulting re
bookings associated with missed connections and cancellations, and
loss of passenger goodwill.

ROBUST AIRLINE SCHEDULING

• Robust airline scheduling is an extension of schedule planning models,
that tries to account for the myriad of uncertainties that arise in the
execution of a schedule.
• The idea is to extend planning models to include both the costs
associated with executing the schedule as planned and the expected
costs of recovering the plan from disruptions. By ignoring recovery costs,
as has been done historically in the generation of “optimal” schedules,
plans are generated that maximize resource utilization and minimize
nonproductive time on the ground, i.e., slack time.
• Lack of slack time, however, makes it difficult for disruptions to be
absorbed in the schedule and limits the number of options for recovery.
While this issue can be overcome by including recovery costs in
optimization models, the associated modeling and computational
challenges of doing so are great.
• To facilitate the generation of robust plans, various proxies of robustness
have been developed. These proxies typically reflect the objective of
developing flexible plans that either provide a rich set of recovery options
for passengers crews and aircraft, or isolate the effects of disruptions,
requiring only localized plan adjustments.

ROBUST SCHEDULE DESIGN

• One approach to robust schedule design is to generate flight
schedules that are likely to minimize passenger delay. The idea is to
select flight departure times to minimize the probability that passenger
misconnections will occur during operations.
• This can be achieved by simply setting departure times “late enough”
to effectively reduce to zero the probability of misconnecting.
• This can be done, in principle, by adding large amounts of slack time
in the schedule. However, the total amount of slack time that can be
added is limited by the number of aircraft available to operate the
flight schedule.
• The challenge, then, is to find the most effective placement of slack,
or equivalently, to select flight leg departure times to minimize the
 number of disrupted passengers, while maintaining a high level of
aircraft productivity.

ROBUST FLEET ASSIGNMENT

Because schedules are sensitive to disruptions at hubs, it follows that
operational robustness is enhanced when hubs are “isolated” to the
greatest extent possible.

The degree to which a hub is isolated can be measured using a hub

connectivity metric; the smaller the value of hub connectivity, the more
isolated the hub.

This concept, when applied to the fleet assignment problem, involves

assigning aircraft types to flight legs to limit total hub.

When compared to solutions generated using a conventional model,

“robust” fleet assignments generated in this manner have been shown to
yield significant reductions in the number of cancelled flight legs, and
improvements in on-time schedule performance, with only small increases
in solution cost
 ROBUST AIRCRAFT ROUTING
Delay propagation occurs when an aircraft scheduled to operate a flight
leg is not ready
at the scheduled time due to an upstream disruption or a delay to one or
more of its earlier assigned flight legs.

Propagated delay, then, is a function of an aircraft’s routing. This gives

rise to a robust aircraft routing model aimed at minimizing delay
propagation and, hence, passenger delays and disruptions, by optimizing
aircraft routing decisions

Optimizing routings, like optimizing departure times, can be cast as

optimizing the placement of slack time in the schedule. Unlike the
optimization of departure times, however, the allocation of slack time is
achieved solely through routing decisions, not through schedule
adjustments.

ROBUST CREW SCHEDULING

To minimize both planned and unplanned costs for crews, it is necessary to balance the
added costs of robust solutions with the reductions in recovery costs enabled by the
solution’s robustness. One approach for doing this is to compute, for each crew pairing,
a value of non-robustness

The value of non-robustness is zero if crews do not change planes, but equals the
potential disruptive effects of delays if the plan requires crews to connect between
different aircraft. The objective of the crew scheduling problem, then, is to minimize the
value of non-robustness, while maintaining the cost of the corresponding crew solution
“close” to that of the minimum cost crew solution.

A move-up crew for a flight is a crew that is not actually assigned to that flight but can
be feasibly assigned to it, if necessary. For this potential reassignment to be feasible
it is required that:

(1) The move-up crew has the same domicile as the assigned crew;
(2) The move-up crew is available to operate the flight at its planned departure time;
(3) The move-up crew is available to operate the rest of the crew schedule that
includes the flight.