Airline disruption management—Perspectives, experiences and outlook

Abstract

Over the past decade, airlines have become more concerned with developing an optimal flight schedule, with very little slack left to accommodate for any form of variation from the optimal solution. During operation the planned schedules often have to be revised due to disruptions caused by for example severe weather, technical problems and crew sickness. Thus, the field of Airline Disruption Management has emerged within the past few years. The increased focus on cutting cost at the major airlines has intensified the interest in the development of new and cost efficient methods to handle airline disruptions.The purpose of this paper is twofold. In the first part it offers an introduction to airline disruption management, provides the readers with a description of the planning processes and delivers a detailed overview of the numerous aspects of airline disruption management. In the second part we report on experiences from a large research and development project on airline disruption management. Within the project the first prototype of a multiple resource decision support system at the operations control center in a major airline, has been implemented.

Handling Airport Ground Processes Based on Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling

“…Then, i and all elements excluded by j are removed from the activity list, before nally j and all linked activities are added at the former position of i or after their last predecessor: All associated successors (with subsequent successors) have to be shifted to the right-hand side of the inserted element. As an individual research area, disruption management originally and traditionally focused on airline aircraft and crew scheduling (see [1,9] for example): The Descartes project, which is concerned with the e cient rescheduling of aircrafts, crews and passengers in case of disruptions, represents the main contribution to the development and application of respective concepts [10,11]. Currently, DM is also being adapted for various other areas: Production planning [12,13] as well as supply chain management [14] represent examples of respective domains of application.…”

Disruption Management in Passenger Railway Transportation

“…Similar to the airline world (see Kohl et al [13]), this question is normally answered by dispatchers monitoring the operations. In the railway world, however, it seems to be more difficult to judge an overall situation, even for experienced dispatchers.…”

Solving Airline Operations Problems Using Specialized Agents in a Distributed Multi-Agent System

“…General Approaches: In [7] the author reports on the experiences obtained during the research and development of project DESCARTES (a large scale project supported by EU) on airline disruption management. The current (almost manual) mode of dealing with recovery is presented.…”

“…The MAS has also the possibility to interact with an electronic market of airline resources such as aircrafts and crew members, through the Company Broker. According to [7] "research on recovery operation to this date only deals with a single airline. Cooperation between airlines is not supported".…”

“…Each team has a specific goal (for example, to guarantee that each flight has the necessary crew members) contributing to the common and general goal of having the airline operation running with few problems as possible. The process of solving these problems is known as Disruption Management [7] or Operations Recovery.…”