I am an assistant professor at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA). Before joining NUAA, I received my Ph.D. degree from Beihang University under the supervision of Prof. Sebastian Wandelt and Xiaoqian Sun. My work is broadly on the design and of scalable and near-exact solution algorithms for aviation optimization related problems, with a focus on column generation and neighborhood search methods. The application domains are various, including airline schedule planning, airline disruption management, airport slot allocation, airspace design and gate assignment problem.
The results of my research are published in leading transportation journals (e.g. Transportation Research Part B/C/E, EJOR, IEEE T-ITS and Transport Policy), as well as top conferences (e.g., ATM Seminar) with total google scholar citations 260000+ 
🔥 News
- 2025.09: I am currently hiring Master students of Engineering at College of Civil Aviation, NUAA. If you are self-motivated, hard-working and have appropriate backgrounds including but not limited to: transportation planning, operations research, computer science, feel free to contact me via email :)
- 2025.08: I am now sponsored by National Nature Science Foundation of China for Integrated Airline Scheduling Under Spatial-temporal Uncertainty (e.g. Demand and Delay).
- 2025.07: We have achieved the 1st place in the CTS-2025 competition for the crew scheduling, Please check this out CTS-2025!
- 2025.05: I have just publsihed a paper titled Machine Learning Assisted Dynamic Copy Generation Approach for Integrated Aircraft and Passenger Recovery Problem in the Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies.
📝 Highlight Publications
Transportation Research Part C
Yifan Xu, Zhiyuan Shen, Zhaoxuan Liu, Xiaoqian Sun
Airline integrated robust scheduling with a variable neighborhood search based heuristic
Transportation Research Part B
Yifan Xu, Sebastian Wandelt, Xiaoqian Sun
Transportation Research Part C
Yifan Xu, Sebastian Wandelt, Xiaoqian Sun
Competitive integrated airline schedule design and fleet assignment
European Journal of Operational Research
Yifan Xu, Nicole Adler, Sebastian Wandelt, Xiaoqian Sun
IMMUNER: Integrated Multimodal Mobility Under Network Disruptions
IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems
Yifan Xu, Sebastian Wandelt, Xiaoqian Sun
🎖 Honors and Awards
- 2024.06 Outstanding Post Doc of Jiangsu Province
- 2023.12 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation of Beihang University
- 2021.09 Sabre Rigor Award.
📖 Educations
- 2017.09 - 2023.06, Beihang University, School of Electronic Information and Engineering, Successive Master and Ph.D.
- 2013.09 - 2017.06, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, College of Civil Aviation, Bachelor.
💻 Internships
- 2021.06 - 2021.12, Sabre Labs.