An improved GRASP for irregular flight recovery

Broken down aircrafts, temporary airport or sector closures often disrupt regular flight schedule. The irregular flight recovery is an NP-hard problem that aims to recover these schedules through a few strategies such as shift airplane, and cancellations. This article develops a new hybrid heuristic procedure based on Greedy Random Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP), and tabu searching algorithm is presented to solve this problem. As compared with the original GRASP method, the proposed algorithm demonstrates quite high global optimization capability. Computational experiments on large-scale problems show that the proposed procedure is able to generate feasible revised flight schedules of a good quality in less than 5 seconds.