Sustainable and Resilient Schedule Coordination for Connecting Flights at Airport Hubs

The arrival delay of connecting flights in a hub-and-spoke network (HSN) can increase operational costs and degrade the level of service, particularly for transfer passengers. Developing a sustainable and resilient schedule by incorporating suitable buffer times can significantly improve the likelihood of successful connections. This paper presents a mathematical model that considers probabilistic flight arrivals at the hub airport to minimize total costs, including those associated with aircraft, gate utilization, and passenger delays. A dual-step search algorithm is developed to determine the optimal buffer times. The model is applied in a case study to optimize the buffer times of connecting flights at a hub airport in Xi’an, China. Additionally, the impacts of model parameters on decision variables and total costs are analyzed. Results indicate that implementing the proposed model can significantly enhance HSN resilience while reducing operational and user costs.