The Operations Research / Management Science Blog

Here is a great video of a professor discussing the importance of Operations Research.

Leon Lasdon, a professor in the Information, Risk, and Operations Management department at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin, discussed the importance of operations research (OR) as an element of corporate decision making Oct. 16 during his undergraduate Faculty Research Presentation Series lecture.

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The webpage Dr. Lasdon showed to his students is here. It is about a case study on how a group of OR professionals developed an OR-based decision-support system that saved Continental Airlines a large amount of their operational costs by aiding the recovery from major disruptions, such as inclement weather, aircraft mechanical problems, and crew unavailability, which would cause flight delays and cancellations. The major interest in this research is to study how to minimize the effects of such disruptions on the scheduling of the airline crews on a global basis. The crews’ ability to service their remaining scheduled flights would be reduced by the disruptions. The system, named CrewSolver, can aid the airline companies to rapidly reassign crews to cover open flights and to return them to their original schedules in the case of an unexpected event.

In addition to helping crew coordinators fully understand the impact of the unexpected events from an operational perspective, the CrewSolver system could help generate globally optimal or near optimal crew recovery solutions. This reduces the difficulty of developing recovery solutions, which would have been done manually without a decision-support system. The crew recovery problems are combinatorial in nature because of factors such as governmental and contractual legality rules and crew quality-of-life issues. This leads to millions of possible alternative solutions. Part of the CrewSolver system is an optimization engine that is capable of producing solutions which take into account the factors simultaneously. The system provides real-time decision support 24/7. In the case of an unexpected event, a crew coordinator uses a graphical user interface to obtain feasible recovery solutions from the optimization server. The solutions consist of possible options such as reassigning crews from one flight to another, holding crews at their current locations and using reserve crews to cover flights left uncovered by active crews.

The power of the CrewSolver system has been revealed several times since its birth. Probably one of the best examples would be the recovery after Tuesday, September 11, 2001. Following the terrorist attack, airspace over the U.S. was closed and all planes were redirected to their nearest airport. Like many airline companies, Continental canceled all scheduled flights through Friday morning. The CrewSolver system, along with another system OpsSolver, were used to recover flight and crew schedules to determine the optimal way to resume operations after the airspace was reopened. The best set of flight cancellations and scheduling changes were derived with the systems. The system solved the recovery problems in less than 17 minutes, saving not only money for the airline company but also valuable time for the travelers (Yu et al., 2003).

OR, especially one of its subareas — scheduling, has been extensively applied in the airline industry for many years. This case is a very good example of how OR professionals can help reduce the costs of operating an airline company. I guess the reason that Dr. Lasdon chose this particular article to talk about is that it really showed the importance of OR to businesses and consumers. After all, even the nicest people can turn into monsters when their flights are delayed.

References
“Professor Leon Lasdon, the Importance of Operations Research” by McCombsIROM, YouTube, Oct 2007
“A New Era for Crew Recovery at Continental Airlines” by Gang Yu et al., Interfaces, Jan-Feb 2003