Application of grey programming in irregular flights scheduling

The sources of irregular to airline schedules are many, including crew absences, mechanical failures, and bad weather. When these unexpected events occur, airlines recover by replanning their operations. This paper introduces the application of grey programming in crew rescheduling. The arrival time of crews are grey variables at the beginning of the irregular flights resuming phrase, but few authors considered it. In this paper, a grey programming method is introduced to solve the crew rescheduling problem. A mathematical model for this problem including grey parameters is presented and a grey simulation technology based on heuristic procedure is proposed to get the optimal results. The feasibility and effectiveness of the model and method are verified by the simulation results.