A PSO approach for robust aircraft routing

To mitigate the impact of unpredictable disruptions, airlines are seeking to proactively design schedules that incorporate some robustness features. In this paper, we propose a novel simulation-optimization approach using a particle swarm optimization algorithm for solving the robust aircraft routing and flight retiming problem. The approach requires inserting buffer times between departure times of flights to improve the robustness of both aircraft and passengers connections. The proposed approach is based on discrete-event simulation for the evaluation of the solutions performance and a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) routine for guiding the search towards enhanced solutions. The results of computational experiments that were carried out on a real data are presented.