An air-rail inter-modal strategy for aircraft recovery

It is common that airlines encounter a disruption of a flight schedule, which is mainly caused by resource shortages. In case of a disruption, subject to scarce resources, most of airlines lose flexibility of performing aircraft recovery on the basis of business interest priorities and need to delay, swap, and cancel flights. This paper proposes an air-rail inter-modal strategy to incorporate a High-Speed Rail (HSR) transport mode into an aviation network for aircraft recovery. The air-rail inter-modal strategy focuses on occasionally operational integration of existing airside and HSR infrastructure capacities. It is different from air-rail cooperation implemented in Europe which emphasizes a long-term strategy. In addition to modelling the air-rail inter-modal strategy, an inter-modal time-band network is presented. Modelling is applied to a pure aviation network and the inter-modal network. Comparison results show that the inter-modal air-rail strategy helps to reduce the number of cancelled flights and the total disruption cost.