Optimization in Airline Integrated Planning and Operations
Part II: Recovery

Ellis L. Johnson (ellis.johnson@isye.gatech.edu)
School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

Download slides here (gzipped PostScript file).

  1. We want to integrate planning with recovery.
    Simple: look at what goes wrong and tell the planning department to incorporate that into the planning.
    Planning department: No we are above that, different department.
    There is a lot of optimization and a lot of different networks, for crews, passengers etc. But nowhere in the model is the cost of an airplane incorparated, airplanes simply don't sit on the ground.
    How should an airline decide on phasing out an airplane?
    A lot of questions arise if two airlines are considering to merge (How much money can be saved by selling extra planes)?
  2. Cancelled flight = cancelled cycle.
    Biggest cause of delay, bags late, overbooking, do not cause big problems. Crew misconnected, bigger problem. Operational problems all the time but rule of thumb is: "Believe schedule is good, pay the price and get back on schedule."
    Whenever a plane is late a code is entered in the computer system so there is a lot of data to analyze.
  4. OCS are big, and looks high tech, there is a lot of info comming in but not high tech in terms of support systems. A lot of people trying to figure what to do. There is no single objective to the decision.
  6. Want to analyse robust planning.
    One recovery procedure: Plane late, delay following plane. This can be bad, people miss connecting flights, crews become illegal (time limit on how long a crew can work). Not unreasonable if thunderstorm at biggest hub, gives you time to do swaps.
    In order to have a robust you need to have delay operations.
  11. Has a lot of deficiencies we have to make up.
  12. Don't have wrap around, trying to get back to schedule. Cost for changing fleettype, have to reissue bording passes.
  13. If a crew is too long on duty it becomes illegal.
  14. Each crew has to be used.
No comments to other slides..
End of talk:.
Q (Audience): Is the ultimate goal to provide methodology for real time decisions.
A (Johnson): Yes also a feedback into the planning process on where to add slack. We want the best solution we can find in the order of minutes.
Also we want to talk to marketing on how we can improve the quality of the product, improving passenger service should be a consideration.