The Operations Research / Management Science Blog

I found this video on the iTunes store. It is a recording of Dr. Tuell Green’s talk on the applications of Operations Research (OR) in the airline industry. Dr. Green earned a Ph.D. in OR from University of North Carolina and worked with American Airlines in Texas. He specializes in Applied Probability in Queuing Theory. This talk was given during the ACU Math & Science Conference in Jan 2006.

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Please note that there are some audio problems with this video file. During several parts of the video there were sudden noises, so keep your volume at a relatively low level while watching it.

During his talk, Dr. Green mentioned that the objectives of the OR department at American Airlines include:

1. Enhance revenues
2. Reduce costs
3. Improve productivity
4. Improve customer service

all of which are achieved by applying OR, quantitative techniques and analytical skills to business tactical problems.

Some of the typical applications of OR he mentioned include:

1. Assignment problem: Which airplanes to be assigned to which markets? Which airplanes are going to fly which routes?
2. Crew and manpower planning: How to plan ahead so that you will have the number of pilots you will need after their training is finished?
3. Pricing issues: How to set the optimal prices for the flight tickets taking into consideration that flights are perishable commodities?
4. Airport operations: How to schedule regular checks and maintenances of the planes?
5. Irregular operations: How to deal with unexpected events, such as severe weather and crew unavailability, and keep your schedules going?

He spent a few minutes talking about what it is like working at the OR department in a corporation. The first thing is that there is a big consulting aspect within an OR analyst’s scope of responsibility because the OR people have to work with people from other departments all across the airline company. Most of those people don’t appreciate math so the OR people need to learn how to communicate their research in non-technical ways. Another aspect is, of course, analysis, which is about doing quantitative work to support critical business decisions. One example he gave was that the OR department has been requested by the corporation to work as consultants on several projects whose common purpose was fuel conservation. The major question is, of course, how to fly airplanes in a more fuel-efficient way.

The last one third of the talk was focused on off-schedule operations and schedule recovery. These are about what OR professionals do when unexpected events happen and affect the schedule of the airline company. There are several major impacts that cause schedule irregularities. These include severe weather, which reduces the capacity of air traffic and causes ground-holding or re-routing of the airplanes. It is also illegal sometimes to ask the crew to fly an airplane under severe weather conditions, so the problems can be really tricky for OR analysts at times. Schedule recovery can be an extremely difficult task and can save airline companies millions of dollars. Some of the questions to be answered when solving a schedule recovery problem include:

1. How many flights should be canceled when the schedule needs to be brought down by 30%?
2. How to rebook the customers who were on those canceled flights?
3. How to recover the schedules of the crew so that the effects on their ability to work on the remaining flights can be minimized?

Some OR-based software tools are used for schedule recovery. They usually are capable of generating possible options based on flight data to aid the decision makers to answer questions like the ones above.

Overall, I think this talk is a very good and a rather non-technical overview of the applications of OR in the airline industry. I would recommend anyone who is new to this field to watch this video.