Descartes







 

Decision Support for Integrated Crew and Aircraft Recovery on the Day of Operations

IST-14049

The airline industry is seeing a growth in airspace congestion over Europe, creating evermore problems and making it increasingly hard to solve these without causing further difficulties. Management of disruption occurring on the day of operation has therefore become an important issue for airlines. Descartes, the name of the research project, will lead to faster recovery, less delays, less costs for the airline, and less unnecessary flying.

"Being able to quickly recover from operational disruption is paramount to delivering quality service to our customers. British Airways is very pleased to be involved in this project to deliver state-of-the-art decision support tools for managing any disruption to our airline operation", says Mark Lennon, Manager of Operations Control Systems at British Airways.

"Bridging the gap between university research and company practice is a key issue for us. The best way to do this is through participation in projects like Descartes, where the goal is produce a decision support tool meeting user requirements and being based on front-line scientific research", says Jens Clausen, Professor in Operations Research at Technical Univeristy of Denmark (DTU).

"We are proud to be working with British Airways and the Technical University of Denmark in making transportation more cost effective, punctual and environmentally-friendly", says Carmen Systems' CEO, Per Norén.

The project is being partly financed by the European Commission research programm for Information Societies Technology (IST) and will run for three years. Partial deliveries are expected after one year.
 
 
 

Project summary

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 important issue for the airlines. Descartes aims at producing a decision support tool for the management of disruptions. The initial outcome will be a new way of organising the operations control at the airline, letting the organisation become an input to the demands of the decision support tool. The outcome from using the tool would be faster recovery from disruptions, less delays, less costs for the airline, and less unnecessary flying due to disruption. The consortium behind the proposal is lead by Carmen Systems, a Swedish SME specialised on resource optimisation systems for the airline industry. The two partners are British Airways, a major European airline, and Technical University of Denmark (DTU), specialised on applied real-time optimisation.

Reports

Links

The Central Office for Delay Analysis

On Time Statistics

International Air Tranport Association (IATA)

Information on René Descartes

The weather in Göteborg
 
 


 



 
 
 
 


 


 
 
 
 


Contact Descartes

[email protected]2/18/00