DESCARTES - Decision support for integrated aircraft and crew recovery on the day of operations
Overview
Background & policy context:
The airline industry experiences growing congestion in the airspace over Europe, making problems more and more common and increasingly difficult to solve without causing new problems. Management of disruption occurring on the day of operation has therefore become an increasingly important issue for the airlines. In fact, all airlines suffer from operational disruption on a regular basis. Disruption shows itself in many ways, whether it be a small disruption, such as an inbound delay from Paris, a medium disruption, say an air traffic control strike in France, or a massive disruption scenario, such as severe weather conditions (e.g. fog or snow) at the UK’s largest airport, London Heathrow.
This project aimed at producing a decision support tool for the management of disruptions in an integrated fashion, taking the key resources into account (aircraft, crew; and most importantly perhaps, the passengers).
Objectives:
The project overall aim was to improve the efficiency of the European transportation system by assisting airlines to recover faster from disruptions. The outcome from using the tool would be faster recovery from disruptions, better service to the customers, fewer delays, fewer costs for the airline, and less unnecessary flying due to disruption.
More in detail, the objectives were:
- To develop a decision support tool for integrated crew and aircraft recovery on the day of operation.
- To jointly develop a prototype version of the integrated system, which would be accepted by experienced operations controllers to be used in managing the operation. It was planned that the prototype would be developed to a state where it was ready to be operational though may still require some productisation.
- Through methodological development enable the real-time solution of large-scale re-planning problems, whereby the methods and algorithms that are been developed would be useful in a number of other industrial cases, for example routing of vehicles, production planning in shipyards, and network planning in telecommunication.
Methodology:
At the beginning of the project the consortium decided against using a traditional 'waterfall' project methodology. Principally this was due to the ambitious nature of Descartes. A methodology was needed which would allow the requirements to be collated in an iterative manner, therefore minimising the risk of detailing the requirements incorrectly which would lead to an undesirable result. An iterative approach proved to be the right one, since as the project progressed changes to the requirements occurred due to a growing understanding of the business by the developers and a deeper understanding of the technical possibilities.
The project methodology adopted by the consortium was DSDM (Dynamic System Development Method), whose inherent features include a prototyping approach and other features that were adapted to meet the needs of the Descartes project.
The core principles used in DSDM are:
- active user involvement;
- empowerment of the core project team to enable quick and timely decisions;
- frequent deliverables in agreed timeboxes;
- iterative and incremental developments, including testing in each timebox;
- requirements are base-lined at a high level.
Overall this approach has worked well, with regular prototyping allowing corrections to be made and risks to be addressed (for instance, the good results from the Descartes Passenger Recovery System has allowed development to be focused more on this system). On the other hand initial difficulties experienced with the development of the Crew System (due to the complexity of how the flight crew are managed on the day) required a more lengthy development on this system.
The project was divided into three groups of activities.
- The first group was user oriented and mainly concerned with the definition of the problem and the organisational setting where the product was going to be used as well as serving as management of the project.
- The second group was concerned with how to solve the problem. It was centred around three prototypes each addressing the disruption management problem, each in more detail than the previous one. For each of these cases, optimisation models were developed which handled the integrated problem of aircraft, crew and passengers. To support the optimisation models (and to make sure that the cases map all relevan
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