DESCARTES - Decision Support for Integrated Aircraft and Crew Recovery on the Day of Operations (January 2000 - December 2002)

Executive Summary

All airlines suffer from operational disruption on a regular basis and the Descartes project was to research, design and deliver a decision support tool which would assist managing disruption in an integrated fashion, taking the key resources into account; aircraft; crew; and most importantly perhaps, the passengers. Disruption to the airline industry 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. The project involved a consortium of companies, Carmen Systems AB in Gothenburg, Sweden, British Airways Plc in London, UK and the Danish Technical University (DTU) in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Descartes was designed to handle all sizes of disruption, and the decision support systems are able to match or better the decisions that the Operations Controllers make (in terms of speed and cost).

The Descartes system is made up of a set of sub systems which are able to solve the disruption from a single resource point of view. There are 3 solvers, aircraft, crew and passenger and each system has a set of parameters to which costs are associated. These parameters are configurable depending on the business strategy for managing disruption (e.g. if the strategy is to delay as opposed to cancel flights, the cancellation cost would be set as expensive, therefore the solution would be steered towards delaying flights instead). In this respect the system is flexible in how solutions are reached. The solutions are also structurally different in their make up, allowing choice to the controller as to the type of solution they would prefer to implement. The sub system solutions are then brought together through a messaging hub, the solutions are then compared and an integrated solution is produced.

The project methodology used was the Dynamic System Development Method, where the suite of systems were built in an iterative fashion and prototypes were developed in 3 monthly cycles. A key characteristic of this method of project management is high levels of user input, and without which this project would not have been nearly so successful.

In general, the consortium believe that the Descartes project has been a resounding success. The core objectives set out in the beginning of the project, in the main, have been achieved. There are prototypes of a system, that, although needing further work to productionise, integrates aircraft, crew and passengers to give quality solutions to operational disruption situations.

Among the key successes are:

• Descartes added value to the business has been proven through a set of business experiments, whereby realistic scenarios have been written and run through both with a controller and the system. In all cases it has been seen that the system has been able to come up with solutions that are of similar or better quality, (with regard to cost) to those of the controllers and the amount of time taken to reach a solution through using the system has been radically reduced.
• Further funding from the Danish Technical Research Council awarded to DTU to further research disruption management for the wider transport industry, looking at the techniques used in Descartes and whether or not these would be applicable outside of the airline industry.
• Carmen Systems has grown considerably over the past three years and currently there are 15 people working on the disruption management tools.
• Contracts have been signed by other airlines in order to implement Descartes in their own Operations Control centres and British Airways is looking at the technical feasibility of implementing Descartes into its own Operation Control.
• Competitors within the IT market who have been looking at disruption management tools have started to adopt the approach the consortium have used in Descartes, seeing integrated sequential recovery as the way forward to integrate the core resources.
• British Airways have used a number of MSc students from DTU for joint benefit, that of helping BA solve business problems and the students to write their theses.
• Carmen have been involved with IATA standardisation and now participate in the standardisation board.