Airline recovery problem under disruptions: A review

Flights are vulnerable to unforeseen factors, such as adverse weather, airport flow control, crew absence, unexpected aircraft maintenance, and pandemic, all of which can cause disruptions in flight schedules. Consequently, managers need to reallocate relevant resources to ensure that the airport can return to normal operations on the basis of minimum cost, a challenge known as the airline recovery problem. Airline recovery is an active research area, with a lot of publications in recent years. To provide a comprehensive overview of airline recovery, first, keywords are selected to search for relevant studies, then existing studies are analyzed in terms of the number of papers, keywords, and sources. The study then delves into an analysis of passenger-oriented airline recovery problems on both traditional and novel recovery strategies. A detailed exploration of novel recovery strategies is conducted to uncover new insights and potential solutions for addressing airline recovery problems. Furthermore, this study investigates recovery strategies for cargo-oriented airline operations, comparing them with those designed for passenger-oriented airline recovery to offer insights for future studies on airline recovery problems. Finally, conclusions are drawn and future study directions are provided. For future studies, it is recommended to conduct more in-depth studies on dynamic and real-time recovery, incorporating human factors into the modeling, multi-modal transportation coupling, optimization of other airport processes, combination of robust scheduling and airline recovery, addressing the stochasticity of parameters, and optimization algorithm improvement.