A Simulation Framework for Evaluating Airline Temporary Schedule Adjustments Following Incidents

Abstract

Many factors affect the performance of temporary schedule adjustments following incidents. These factors include static recovery scheduling, stochastic flight delays and ‘real-time’ schedule adjustments. Most research on recovery scheduling has focused on improving static recovery scheduling models. None has analyzed these factors from a systems perspective. The research on which this paper is based proposes a framework, embodying a simulation process, that is not only be able to analyze the influence of stochastic flight delays on static recovery scheduling, but can also help to design more effective flexible buffer times and ‘real-time’ schedule adjustment rules. To test the framework we perform a simulation using data from a Taiwan domestic airline. The preliminary results show that the framework could be usefully applied by airlines in practice.