Optimization Approaches to Airline Industry Challenges
Prof. Cynthia Barnhart of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at MIT will deliver this lecture as part of the Fall 2006 Operations Research / Management Science Seminar series. All are invited to attend.
Title: Optimization Approaches to Airline Industry Challenges
Abstract: Commercial aviation operations are supported by an extremely complex transportation system, with airports defining the fixed nodes on which the system is built, and aircraft providing the basic transportation services between these nodes. These services are provided for passengers, who demand transportation between a multitude of origins and destinations, and request specific travel dates and times; and are provided by crews of pilots and flight attendants who operate the aircraft and provide service to passengers. The process of coordinating the schedules and plans for these various entities is referred to as aircraft and crew scheduling, or airline schedule planning. In this paper, we highlight some earlier work in schedule planning, describing the approaches taken and the resulting impacts. We then describe more recent efforts that recognize the dynamic, stochastic nature of the air transportation system and attempt to build improved schedules that are more resilient to disruptions; easier to adjust to realized operating conditions; and achieve improved performance and increased utilization of personnel, aircraft and airport resources.
This series is organized by the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter. Support for this series is provided by the Isenberg School of Management, the Department of Finance and Operations Management, and the John F. Smith Memorial Fund.
Check here for more details about this speaker series.
