AGIFORS Airline Operations 2010
Enabling Dependability and Efficiency

Technical Program (Based on submitted abstracts to date*)

These submitted abstracts have been conditionally accepted for inclusion in the AGIFORS Airline Operations conference agenda.  Final acceptance is contingent on 1) receipt of complete presentation on/before 07 May 2010, and 2) approval of presentation content by the AGIFORS technical committee.

Monday - 24 May 2010

Dynamic Cost Index Management in Flight Planning and Flight Following
Steve Altus - Jeppesen

Cost Index (CI) was introduced as a measure of the ratio of the value of time to the cost of fuel, to help a Flight Management Computer (FMC) manage the speed of an aircraft throughout its flight.  While the definition of CI, which directly drives the speeds chosen, assumes a continuous linear cost of time, actual aircraft operating costs have a more complex nature, including large discrete costs and rate changes at specific arrival times.  In this presentation, we explore the source and nature of time-based aircraft operating costs, and propose using a flight planning system to pick the optimal CI value for a specific flight, using the latest available information.

Economic Trends and their Likely Effect on Airline Operations
Beatrice Roloff - M2p Consulting

Where all airlines have been affected by the economic downturn, some worse than others, the industry as a whole is beginning to look for the light at the end of the tunnel. Which regions are heading upward, and which ones are not? What is the industry outlook in terms of passenger & cargo traffic, and what can we expect from the still volatile fuel situation? What effect will the current & forecasted economic situation have on airline operations practices and conditions.

Robust Scheduling to Minimise Delay Propagation
Richard Wu - University of New South Wales

To retain a degree of tractability, the airline scheduling problem has traditionally been sequentially decomposed into various stages (eg. schedule generation, fleet assignment, aircraft routing, and crew pairing), with the decisions from one stage imposed upon the decision making process in subsequent stages. Whilst this approach greatly simplifies the solution process, it unfortunately fails to capture the many dependencies between the various stages, most notably between those of aircraft routing and crew pairing, and how these dependencies affect the propagation of delays through the flight network. As delays are commonly transferred between late running aircraft and crew, it is important that aircraft routing and crew pairing decisions are made together. The propagated delay may then be accurately estimated to minimize the overall propagated delay for the network and produce a robust solution for both aircraft and crew. In this presentation we outline a new approach to accurately calculate and minimize the cost of propagated delay, in a framework that integrates aircraft routing and crew pairing.

Tuesday - 25 May 2010

Accelerating Operations Control with Business Intelligence Solutions
Gesine Varfis – Lufthansa Consulting

The development of Operations Control Centers is at crossroads. Best practice Integrated Operations Control Centers are already challenged while network carriers still struggle with their legacy systems. Airlines need to find out how to generate bankable results beyond the low hanging fruits. Lufthansa Consulting would like to share the latest trends in how to empower confident, faster and more economic driven decision making in the area of Operations Control with business intelligence solutions, performance analytics and forecasting. Moreover Lufthansa Consulting would like to give an outlook on how future Operations Control could look like.

Short Term Maintenance Allocation
Sergey Shebalov, Michael Clarke - Sabre Airline Solutions

Short term maintenance allocation is a process of building and supporting a weekly maintenance schedule for each tail operated by an airline to ensure its availability. We present a model that automatically creates an optimal set of maintenance blocks for a given tail assignment and simultaneously allocates maintenance events to these blocks so that aircraft utilization, maintenance cost and other metrics are optimized. We take into account detailed time and location requirements for multiple maintenance activities and use cycles, flown hours and calendar days counters for expiration date calculation. We allow both standalone and repeatable maintenance events. In addition capacity constraints on parking spaces and man-hours for maintenance bases are introduced. We test the model on several realistic scenarios with multiple settings. In the second phase we extend our formulation to allow overnight aircraft swaps and thus integrate maintenance allocation with tail assignment. Our results demonstrate significant benefits of such integration.

Integrating Tail and Gate Assignment
Amy Cohn - University of Michigan

Modifying Lines of Flight for Improved Robustness
Amy Cohn - University of Michigan

Planned lines-of-flight determine where aircraft are expected to start and end each day, but these lines are often disrupted over the course of the day. We propose modifications to the LOFs that increase the likelihood of being able to reach planned maintenance opportunities despite these disruptions.

Better decision making by improved Operations Control Center management tools
George Webster - Lufthansa Systems

Operational applications that measure the robustness and health of an airlines operation are improving the situational awareness for operations controllers.  Having a clear picture of how the airline is performing in a busy multi functional Operations Control Center helps understand what has happened so far and what may be to come.  Lufthansa Systems has developed a unique and advanced “Integrated Control Panel” that is used with their Integrated Operations Control Center Platform.  The IOCC Integrated Control Panel combines the ability to view Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and Key Disruption Indicators (KDI’s) within a single application.  The KPI’s are a measurement of the performance collected from numerous systems.  The KDI’s are indicators that predict disruption in advance so that the operators can make adjustment and minimize the negative effects or avoid the pending situation altogether.  The IOCC Integrated Control Panel is one of the management tools of the IOCC Platform, which allows airlines to optimize the highly complex and dynamic processes of the day to day operation where even small disruptions can have significant financial and operational impacts if not tackled early and in the most efficient way. When dealing with irregularities such as adverse weather conditions, hub congestion, crew staffing or technical problems the IOCC Integrated Control Panel allows the operational controller to see things from every angle. Even in routine operations having the big picture leads to better decisions and increased efficiency.

An Optimization Based Approach to Airline Integrated Recovery
Gustaf Solveling - Georgia Institute of Technology

With 22% of all flights being delayed and 3% being canceled in the U.S. since 2001, schedule perturbations are inevitable. Given some time horizon, the recovery process seeks to repair the flight schedule, aircraft rotations, crew schedule, and passenger itineraries in a tractable manner. Each component individually can be difficult to solve, so early research on irregular operations has studied these problems in isolation and more recent work has integrated a subset of the four components. We present an optimization-based approach to the recovery problem and, to the best of our knowledge, are the first to present computational results on the fully integrated problem.

Emissions Management and Impact on Your Business (Panel Discussion)
Tom Samuel - Sabre Airline Solutions

Managing and reducing emissions is environmentally focused that is not only smart business but also community focused.  However understanding the impact of emissions management in short run is critical to effectively manage your airlines operations.  In this presentation we will discuss the basics of EU base emissions plans and how it impacts your business and what you should be planning and preparing for in next few years.

 
Wednesday - 26 May 2010

Large Scale Passenger Reaccomodation Optimization
Semi Gabteni - Amadeus

Multi-commodity network flow models have been successfully applied to Passenger Reaccomodation Optimization. However, the state-of-the-art doesn't provide details on how to cope with the heavy computation requirements of the related MIP solution methods for large scale networks. We present an approach based on an original preprocessing procedure. The resulting reaccomodation engine is successfully combined to aircraft recovery engines in providing best known solutions to public aircraft and passenger recovery problems with up to 6,000 flights and 700,000 passengers in less than 5 minutes.

Incorporating fatigue modelling into optimised pairing and roster
Jim Kenneally - Constraint Technologies International

The CTI fatigue model BSAFR is an enhanced fatigue model that not only draws upon the literature currently available in this field, but also incorporates the latest research in genetics and molecular biology. BSAFR delivers the latest and most pertinent research and development in this field in a model that can be integrated into Paring and Rostering applications. CTI has partnered with the Monash Sleep and Cronobiology Research Group to define and calibrate the model. By incorporating analysis of fatigue into pairing and rostering optimisation airlines can operate with an objective measure of fatigue for each crew member.

The Must, the Best --- Two Different Types of Rules in Auto Crew Planning
Xianchang Wang - Chengdu Soft-Intelligent Technology Ltd
 
In auto crew planning, we find that there are two different kinds of rules need to be processed in different ways. One is the type of rules, such as "any crew can only execute maximal of 40 flying hours within any 7 consecutive days". These rules must be respected. However in real life, in order to make the crew planning results more reasonable or more like human made just like our crew scheduler says, there are lots of other rules, such as "if you arrange crew flying outside his/hew crew base, he/she should be better to perform flying tasks in continually 4 days". These rules are better to be respected but allow exceptions during the process of auto crew planning.  Based on our rule-based platform, we develop an auto-planning system which can handle these two kinds of rules and can resolve 95% percent of client's planning tasks under the very high pressure situation that in China, flying crews are at very high shortage.

Focusing Efficiently on Disruptions with Advanced Visualization Tools
Luis Alvarez - Lufthansa Systems

The Gantt Chart may be the standard tool for visualising your operational schedule, but considering the large information traffic today, it quickly reaches its limits as soon as disruptions occur. The modern operations controller needs to be on top of the information flow and focus on those items which help find solutions. An operations control system should facilitate management by exception and provide dedicated views for specific problems. In this talk we will explore various visualisation solutions achieving these goals and discuss their benefits.

Reducing Roster Generation Effort and Employee Contract Complexity
Xuehua Lu - Sabre Airline Solutions

When creating an employee roster, how do you ensure you are staffing to efficiently cover the work tasks while maintaining compliance with your employee contracts? And, how can you accomplish these two goals while reducing staff administration time and costs?
Using optimization technologies allows the generation of complex rosters simultaneously accounting for different level of constraints such as travel time, task priority, shift types, roster rules, previous assignments and solution level restrictions to generate efficient, fair and yet deployable rosters, with the minimum amount of staff administrative time and effort.

Towards Optimum Hub Operations
Gustaf Solveling - Georgia Institute of Technology

Air traffic control and traffic flow management in and around major metropolitan airports have to date been the sole province of air navigation service providers. We present the architecture for and the components of a tool suite that can be used to manage the surface and terminal area operations within the context of an airline's hub operations. Specifically, utilization of this tool suite will enable optimum hub-operations. 

* Technical Program is subject to change

     Abstract Submission Process

            Complete the on-line submission form and submit it directly via the web at www.agifors.org/studygrp/opsctl/2010/present.html

     Please note that it is very important that your abstract provides as much detail as possible as to what you will cover in your presentation. We can always shorten the final abstract to be published in the conference proceedings.

The AGIFORS Airline Operations 2010 conference technical program is currently being finalized, for more information please contact tim.niznik (at) aa.com or at 817-967-3784.

Please refer to previous years conference proceedings for a complete listing of technical talks given in the past at AGIFORS Airline Operations meetings.

• 2009 - Montreal, Canada
• 2008 - Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• 2007 - Denver, Colorado
• 2006 - Dubai, United Arab Emirates
• 2005 - Mainz, Germany
• 2004 - Washington, DC
• 2003 - Auckland, New Zealand
• 2002 - Rome, Italy
• 2001 - Ocho Rios, Jamaica
• 2000 - Budapest, Hungary
• 1999 - Istanbul, Turkey

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