A multi-objective approach for robust airline scheduling

We present a memetic approach for multi-objective improvement of robustness influencing features (called robustness objectives) in airline schedules. Improvement of the objectives is obtained by making minor incremental changes to the flight schedule - by retiming the flights - and the aircraft rotations, subject to a fixed fleet assignment. Approximations of the Pareto optimal front are obtained by applying a multi-meme memetic algorithm. We investigate biased meme selection to encourage exploration of the boundaries of the search space and compare it with random meme selection. An external population of high quality solutions is maintained using the adaptive grid archiving algorithm. The presented approach is applied to investigate simultaneous improvement of reliability and flexibility in real world schedules from KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. Experimental results show that the approach enables us to obtain schedules with significant improvements for the considered objectives. A large ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: COR
• Authors: Edmund K. Burke, Patrick De Causmaecker, Geert De Maere, Jeroen Mulder, Marc Paelinck, Greet Vanden Berghe
• Keywords: COR 2010, Large Scale Simulation, Multi-meme Memetic Algorithms, Robustness Objectives