  In practice, both passenger and cargo flights are vulnerable to unexpected
factors, such as adverse weather, airport flow control, crew absence,
unexpected aircraft maintenance, and pandemic, which can cause disruptions in
flight schedules. Thus, managers need to reallocate relevant resources to
ensure that the airport can return to normal operations on the basis of minimum
cost, which is the airline recovery problem. Airline recovery is an active
research area, with a lot of publications in recent years. To better summarize
the progress of airline recovery, first of all, keywords are chosen to search
the relevant studies, then software is used to analyze the existing studies in
terms of the number of papers, keywords, and sources. Secondly, the airline
recovery problem is divided into two categories, namely Passenger-Oriented
Airline Recovery Problem (POARP) and Cargo-Oriented Airline Recovery Problem
(COARP). In POARP, the existing studies are classified according to recovery
strategies, including common recovery strategies, cruise speed control
strategy, flexible aircraft maintenance strategy, multi-modal transportation
strategy, passenger-centric recovery strategy, and clubbing of flights
strategy. Moreover, the POARP is discussed from the perspectives of disruption
types, recovery strategies, problem types, objective functions, and solution
methods. Thirdly, POARP and COARP are compared from the perspectives of
timeliness, subjectivity, flexibility, transferability, and combinability.
Finally, the conclusions are drawn and future study directions are provided.
For future studies, it is recommended to conduct more in-depth research 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, and optimization
algorithm improvement.
