Scheduling Flight Perturbations with Ant Colony Optimization Approach

The disturbance incidences are common events in the flight networks in many countries. On the other hand, the survival of busy airlines in this strict and competitive business is crucial and tough. Therefore solving flight perturbation scheduling problem, in order to provide an optimized schedule in low computational time, is very important. This problem and its related literature have not yet been investigated seriously in Iran. One of the smart methods in solving routing and scheduling problems is ant colony optimization method which creates high quality results. In this paper, a model and a number of solution strategies for flight perturbation problem are presented. An approach based on ant colony optimization algorithm is used to solve the model. The computational results with real problem data show that the proposed method is highly efficient and effective in solving complex perturbation problems. The use of the proposed method can increase fleet life time and decrease air traffic and fuel consumption.