The AGIFORS 56th Annual Symposium has been scheduled for 10-14 October 2016.

We have a packed technical program and strong sponsorship, which should make for a wonderful conference. In addition, the finalists for the Anna Valicek Paper will compete.

Conference Overview

This year's Symposium will offer the latest innovation in airline operations research. Various topics to be discussed include airline operations, airline strategy, cargo logistics, crew scheduling, e-commerce, information technology, OR management, revenue management, robust planning, and scheduling planning. Representatives from airlines, air transport associations, universities, industrial research labs, and consultants will discuss new ideas and present technical papers. The conference includes a vendor program for you to review the latest products. Come and share with us your ideas, thoughts, current trends, philosophies, and latest technological advances on any of the above or related topics.

Who Should Attend this Conference

The AGIFORS Symposium provides an ideal forum for airline senior management, airline personnel, vendors, and members of academia to review and debate the most pressing issues facing the global airline industry today, offer potential solutions, and provide opportunity for high level networking.

• Airline executives in airline operations, cargo and logistics, crew management, revenue management and distribution, strategic and schedule planning
  
• Business Solution Managers
  
• Key Information Technology System Users
  
• Project Managers, Directors, Team Leaders
  
• Operations research practitioners and managers
  
• Software vendors in the airline information technology field
  

For more information or if you have any questions, please contact:

Goran Stojkovic

Email: Goran.Stojkovic@jeppesen.com

Submissions are now invited for the 2016 Anna Valicek graduate student paper award competition. The Anna Valicek award recognizes original and innovative research in the application of operations research to airline and/or airline related business problems.

Up to two finalists will be selected and will receive air transportation, accommodations, and registration fees to attend the Annual Symposium to be held in Santiago, Chile, to present their work. The winner will be awarded a silver medal and a U.S. $2,500 honorarium. The other finalist will be awarded a bronze medal and a U.S. $1000 honorarium.

Submissions for the 2016 Anna Valicek Award will close on July 1, 2016, 18:00 EDT. There will be no deadline extension.

Details about requirements, judging criteria and how to submit an entry can be found at Current Competition

Welcome to the new AGIFORS website. Besides a new look-and-feel, we hope that you find it easier to navigate and find the information you are seeking. In addition, the website is now fully platform friendly and can be viewed on tablets and smartphones. We are also implementing Study Group forums where you can interact with your fellow study group members. 

However, the Members section is not yet fully developed and your login will not work. You will be receiving an email early in 2016 with your new login instructions.

Please keeping coming back as we roll out new features and content.

Last year represented the first of a three-year term for AGIFORS Council members. The Council included several first-time members (Eric Ruhlin from United, Goran Stojkovic from Jeppesen, and Mirela Stojkovic from Delta). The AGIFORS Council and Study Group Chairs achieved several milestones last year. The RM Study Group held the first ever AGIFORS meeting in China. We rolled out a more consistent brand image for AGIFORS including banners, logos, and medals for Best Presentation Awards for each of the study groups. For the first time in 20 years, Tim Jacobs did not organize the Annual Symposium (he just paid for everything as treasurer). It took a team to replace Tim in the planning of our Annual Symposium, including Semi Gabteni from Amadeus as our Technical Chair, Goran Stojkovic as our Symposium Chair, Anne-Jan Beeks from KLM as our Sponsorship Coordinator, and David Foster from INFORM as our webmaster. Our Anna Valicek competition, chaired by Mirela Stojkovic, continues to be the premier student paper award in aviation.

During the second year of the Council members’ terms, the AGIFORS Council has the privilege of selecting up to two AGIFORS Fellows. The Fellows Award is the most prestigious award an AGIFORS member can receive, and is reserved for individuals who have demonstrated outstanding and exceptional accomplishments and experience in the application of operations research to air transportation and who made significant contributions to the AGIFORS community over an extended period of time through participation and leadership. This year, AGIFORS is breaking with tradition and announcing its Fellows in advance of the 2016 Annual Symposium so that all members can join us in congratulating our two Fellows: Greg Lough and Armando Silva.

Greg Lough served tirelessly as an officer through four successive councils. In addition to the symposium meetings, he was consistently active in the RM study group. Greg started his career at Continental Airlines and retired in 2014 as Managing Director of Revenue Decision Support at United Airlines following the merger of the two carriers. Greg spent much of his tenure simplifying complicated OR innovations to make them work within the limitations of the airline industry’s aging inventory & distribution infrastructure. He transformed the way the airline forecasted demand and led the implementation of O&D availability and marriage controls. Greg has been a long-term active AGIFORS member, and served for over a decade in many key positions on the AGIFORS Council, most notably as Treasurer from 2003 to 2014 where he led the implementation of robust processes for the management of the group’s finances.

Armando Silva was a founding member of AADT and rose up the ranks to eventually become the Managing Director of Operations Research at AA. He was influential in the early days of applying OR to customer loyalty, pricing, sales, and revenue management. Armando was a continuous and active participant in AGIFORS from the late 1990s until his retirement in 2012. He reinitiated the OR Manager’s Study group after many years of dormancy. Over the years, Armando supported many of this staff and encourage them to make presentations. Many of these presentations won awards, including those by Tim Niznik, Tim Jacobs, Matt Koral, Elizabeth Hunt, and Tuell Green. Armando was also more than willing to help recruit keynote speakers for AGIFORS meetings and host meetings, including the AGIFORS Symposium in Hawaii.

Planning for our five meetings next year is well underway. Marcel Sol from Qatar will be organizing the Crew meeting, likely to be held in Doha next spring, Michael Clarke from Sabre and Tim Niznik from American will be organizing the Ops conference in Seattle next spring, and Sunny Ja and Tassio Carvalho from America have signed the contract to host the Revenue Management meeting in Seeheim, just outside Frankfurt, on May 19-20, 2016 with welcome reception on May 18. The locations for the Strategic Scheduling and Planning (SSP) group (organized by Sergey Shebolov of Sabre) and the Annual Symposium will be announced shortly (for those that need a location for budgeting purposes, we are targeting Europe for the Symposium and Europe/Asia for SSP). As part of the 2016 Annual Symposium, Stefan Karisch of Jeppesen will launch the new OR Strategy and Management Working Group as successor of the former OR Managers Working Group.