Disruption Management in Airline Operations: A Solver-based Approach using Time-Space Network Optimization

Abstract

This paper presents AIRS, a day-of-operations disruption-recovery system. AIRS.ACR models integrated aircraft-crew recovery on a Time-Space Network (TSN) and solves a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) that enforces rotation continuity, crew legality, maintenance windows, slot capacities, and multi-leg integrity via flow-balance constraints; disruption-aware search-space construction and warm starts control combinatorial growth. A companion module, AIRS.PaxR, performs rapid passenger re-accommodation using greedy assignment and lightweight evolutionary search while preserving aircraft-crew feasibility. Across realistic evaluations, AIRS meets operational decision windows and reduces recovery costs relative to manual or sequential methods, providing a scalable, extensible decision-support capability for operations control centers.