| dc.description.abstract | This thesis presents three major contributions for commercial aviation planning and disruption recovery in commercial aviation. The first contribution presented in this thesis consists of a flight planning model to calculate Block Time and Fuel (BTF) consumed for an aircraft model during the flight. The BTF model computes the ground distance between the origin and destination airports, derives the flight’s cruise altitude, and by integrating two institutional data sets calculates the duration and the fuel consumed for the whole of taxi-out, take-off, climb, cruise, descent, approach, landing, and taxi-in phases. The model renders very good results for block time and consumed fuel however, it does not consider aircraft weight loss neither the influence of the wind. The second contribution of this thesis consists of a recovery procedure for disrupted aircraft rotations, the Constructive Heuristic for the Aircraft Recovery Problem (CHARP). The CHARP recovers the infeasible rotation combining a meta-heuristic that performs a pincer movement over the search space and Constraint Programming (CP). Additionally, the CHARP uses Constraint Propagation to reduce the size of the search therefore reducing computing. The initial experiments demonstrated that if Constraint Propagation was not used computing time would double. The recovery strategy included flight creation delays and cancellations however it did not include aircraft swap. The third contribution of this thesis combines the BTF model and the CHARP. Since the BTF model returns lower block time flights than those used by the CHARP this thesis investigates six disruption scenarios with shorter block time. | en_US |
