Robust airline scheduling with turnaround under uncertainty: towards collaborative airline scheduling

Robust airline scheduling fosters operational resilience in aviation by producing plans that remain feasible despite ensuing disruptions. This paper analyses the airline scheduling process, including flight scheduling, fleet assignment, aircraft routing, and crew pairing. It examines how previous studies optimise these decisions and deal with the influence of the aircraft ground handling (turnaround) process, an important aspect of airport operations that is known to often create havoc in flight timetables. The analysis of the literature focuses on how to harness turnaround resilience to improve airline schedule robustness and applies a framework of variables (characteristics) to support data collection and synthesis. The variables include levels of integration of multiple planning stages, uncertainty modelling, turnaround consideration, type of robustness sought, and type of optimisation method employed. Based on our review, we propose a comprehensive airline scheduling process that incorporates turnaround planning to enhance the estimation of aircraft turn time, crew sit time, and passenger connecting time under uncertainty. More precise estimates will enable models to produce robust schedules at a lower cost (shorter buffer times). Since third-party organisations typically operate turnarounds, this planning approach needs to involve multiple autonomous decision-makers. Therefore, we encourage a collaborative robust scheduling framework to be built on existing operations research theories and industry protocols.