An algorithm for the recovery of disrupted airline schedules

We consider the recovery of an airline schedule after an unpredicted event, commonly called disruption, that makes the planned schedule unfeasible. In particular we consider the aircraft recovery problem for a heterogeneous fleet of aircrafts, made of regular and reserve planes, where the maintenance constraints are explicitly taken into account and different maintenance constraints can be imposed. The aim is to find the optimal combination of routes within a given time horizon for each plane in order to recover to the initial schedule, given the initial schedule and the disrupted state of the planes. We present the main methodological ideas and numerical results illustrating the relevance of the method.