Air transportation network robustness optimization under limited legs itinerary constraint

In air transportation networks the robustness of a network regarding node and link failures is a key factor for its design. At the same time, travelling passengers usually prefer the itinerary with fewer legs. In this paper the authors propose three design methods, which can maximize the air transportation network robustness and make sure every itinerary within this network have fewer legs than a given number. In the first design method, the problem is formulated as a mixed-integer, semidefinite program, and an algorithm to obtain optimal solutions is applied based on cutting plane and bisection methods. The second and third method is to apply local search heuristics like tabu search and 2-opt respectively to find a potentially global optimal design solution. The simulation results present the performance of our proposed algortihms.