Decision support for airline system operations control and irregular operations

This paper reports on the application of the integration of computer science and operations research in a decision support system for airline system operations control. The application integrates real-time flight following, aircraft routeing, maintenance, crew management, gate assignment and flight planning with dynamic aircraft re-scheduling and fleet re-routeing algorithms for irregular operations. The system described in this paper was designed and developed on distributed desktop UNIX workstations, networked through ethernet TCP/IP communications, with an X Windows Motif graphical user interface. The algorithms help flight controllers optimally re-route the aircraft, crews and passengers when operational problems disrupt the execution of the schedule plan. The system includes: real-time, interactive, graphical aircraft routeing displays; a rule system which provides warnings of constraint violations and unusual conditions; and the ability to generate “what-if” solution scenarios. The integrated system is demonstrated by simulating a disruption to a planned schedule and by using one of the available tools, a network flow algorithm, to determine optimal re-routeing alternatives.