AGIFORS Schedule and Strategic Planning 2003
Study Group Meeting

 

Holiday Inn
Toulouse, France
11-12 September 2003

 

This is the annual AGIFORS Study Group meeting where delegates meet to exchange ideas relating to airline planning. The emphasis is on developing Operations Research techniques and systems to optimise fleet and schedules. OR techniques are also used improve revenues and improve punctuality of proposed flight schedules. The attendees at this annual study group meeting exchange ideas relating to strategic decision making, fleet selection, fleet assignment, route planning, scheduling as well as airspace and airport capacity issues.

" What Now ? ”

Venue
Holiday Inn, 
Toulouse France

Conference Dates

Thursday 11 September 2003 @ 0815am
Fridat 12 September 2003 @ 4pm

Chairman
 Ken Wang

Hosts

Airbus Industrie

EURESAS
(European Centre for the Aerospace and Aviation Industries)


Theme

The events of 11th Sep 2001 in NYC, Bali bombing, war in Iraq and SARS has resulted in the most serious blows to the industry in its history. What have we learned in terms of strategic and tactical planning? Many have adopted survival mode but now what is the optimal “upsize” strategy ? This year we will again review OR models that has helped many airlines to adapt to these very difficult conditions.

This conference this year will address strategic fleet planning & scheduling problem and but focus on the following issues:

Active participation by the attendees of this meeting is necessary for it to be successful. We therefore encourage you to share your ideas with the others in airline OR in the form of a presentation to the group. A soft copy of your presentation should be made available for the meeting and for publication. (Power Point).  Presentations do not need to describe a completed or implemented work. An update on a long-term project or a discussion of ideas for the future development is often as interesting and useful to the group. 

If you are planning to make a presentation please email 
Ken Wang a short summary (50 words) by 22th July, 2003. 
(email: kenwang@attglobal.net)

Information

Provisional Programme

Thursday 11th  September

0815     Conference Registration 

0935     Welcome

0945     Keynote Speaker - Paul Clark  
            Euresas Toulouse

1030    Airline Planning OR review

1115    Coffee break

1145      The Evolution of Market Allocation Models
            R. A. Parker, Chief of Technology and Market Research,  Boeing Commercial Aircraft

Boeing Marketing has developed advanced methods of determining the distribution of passengers within an airline network, building on the standard QSI, but extending the concept using modern random utility theory.  These include determination of the fare-dollar value of equipment and service features, estimation of the effects on consumer surplus due to network and equipment improvements, and reconsideration of the evolution of network architectures.  This paper will summarize these developments and sketch out our current and future research program.

1230     Lunch provided at the hotel

1400     A Multi-Criteria Optimization Approach for Building Robust Aircraft Rotations
            Qing Zhao, Delta Technology

Building a robust aircraft rotation is a challenging task due to its nature of multi-criteria objectives and a very complex combination of soft and hard constraints.  In this talk we will present an approach which combines the use of daily, weekly and fully-dated models with global and heuristic optimization techniques.

1445     Holistic planning for profitability
          Tore Jenner, Industrial Optimisers

The scheduling process is traditionally divided into fleet planning, network analysis, scheduling, fleet assignment, maintenance routing, crewing analysis and slot analysis. The presentation shows how a true integration of advanced optimization tools into a single user-friendly application allows airline management to make better and faster decisions concerning the airline’s main profitability driver, the schedule.

1530     Coffee Break

1600     Codeshare Optimizer – Maximizing Codeshare Revenues
            Raj Sivakumar, Director, Research and Development, United Airlines

The airline industry is currently seeing a surge of code share agreements, partly as a means to combat the adverse revenue situation in the industry. The conventional wisdom on code share has been that greater the extent of code share, in terms of flights and connections, more is the revenue upside to each carrier. We will discuss the economics of code share. We also present the Code Share Optimizer, a network optimization tool built by United’s R&D group that considers the complex interaction between the demand, fares, market shares and the prorate agreements to recommend optimal code share levels. 

1845     Group Dinner
            A short walk to a local restaurant

 

Friday 12th September 

0930     Fleet Assignment Model using Station Decomposition Formulation and Initial Computational Results
            Barry Smith, Sabre & Ellis Johnson Georgia Tech

The station decomposition approach to fleet assignment takes advantage of the hub and spoke structure typical of airline schedules. This paper describes station decomposition formulation and computation results versus typical fleet assignment models.  Station decomposition allows some aspects of schedule robustness to be efficiently modelled.  We illustrate situations in which station decomposition provides significant efficiencies.  In general, station decomposition is not as efficient as a single model.  We investigate several approaches to improving station decomposition efficiency.

1015     An Innovative Techniques on the air traffic demand forecast Probabilisation

            Daniel Salier , Statistics Forecasting & Simulation Director , Aeroport de Paris

Innovative probabilistic techniques on the air traffic demand. In addition we have developed the techniques to aggregate or disaggregate the functions of probability depending on which level of detail one is working on. Four causes of uncertainty are Inadequate assumptions, the very nature of the models, the uncertainty on the parameters of the models and the residuals. The (empiric) laws of probability of any of these four components should be determined first bootstrap techniques) and then combined together with the help of Monte Carlo techniques.  The main drawback of this approach is its complexity, having to deal with probability which tends to be quite tricky, and the fact that it's very (computer) time consuming.

1100     Study Group Administration Business Meeting

1115    Coffee break

1145     Quantifying Resource Impact on Schedule Profitability
           Manoj Lohatepanont and Timothy L. Jacobs, Operations Research and Decision Support, American Airlines

Traditional airline fleeting models focus on the efficient allocation of scarce aircraft resources while maximizing overall profitability of the schedule.   These models rarely incorporate the other limiting resources such as flight deck, cabin and ground crew availability.  This paper presents an approach to quantifying the impact personnel resources have on schedule profitability.  Results indicate that limited overall profitability increase can be achieved as support resources are reduced due to improvements in crew efficiency.  As the reduction in support resources continues, adverse impacts begin to emerge on the overall profitability by forcing the cancellation of profitable flights.  Our paper shows how airlines can establish optimal support resource levels, at which overall profitability is maximized.

1230     Lunch provided at the hotel

1400   The Aircraft Rotation Problem at Air France
            Romain Ambrosini, Sébastien Lemaire and Cyrille Gueguen, OR Department, Air France

The aircraft rotation problem arises at Air France after the schedule design and the fleet  assignment.  The aim of this problem is to built successions of flights  given a number of aircraft. The main point of our tool is to take into account some important operational constraints, in order to have a high stability  between the forecast rotation and the achieved  one.  Short computation times allow the user to examine a large number of schedules.

1445      Open Forum “ Where do we go from here?”
In this era of increasing uncertainty of the airline environment, what are the emerging “killer” OR techniques that can be engineered to face this challenge and remake the industry.
 
1545 Final farewell coffee

 

Important Reminder

·        Delegates should arrive in Toulouse France no later than the evening of Wednesday, 10th September and check-in at the Holiday Inn Hotel in Toulouse.

 ·        Meeting Registration starts at 8:15am Thursday, 11th September   fees for the conference will be collected then in cash & in EUROs.