Airline transportation

We provide a survey of recent research on airline schedule planning and recovery problems, with a focus on achieving robust operations.  Schedule planning problems involve determining the flight schedule, and the corresponding aircraft and crew assignments that maximize airline profits while satisfying a myriad of regulatory rules and collective bargaining requirements.  Recovery problems involve re-planning in real-time to find new minimum cost plans for aircraft, crews and passengers when operations are disrupted by weather, mechanical failures, crew illness, etc.  We describe modeling and algorithmic approaches, and highlight some of the impacts of applying these techniques in the airline industry. 

Cynthia Barnhart is a Professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department and the Engineering Systems Division at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  At MIT, Professor Barnhart has developed and taught courses including Carrier Systems, Optimization of Large-Scale Transportation Systems, Airline Schedule Planning and The Airline Industry.  Professor Barnhart's research activities have focused on the development of optimization models and methods for designing, planning and operating transportation systems.  Her work has been published in several books and scholarly journals.  She currently serves as the Director of the Sustainable Transportation and Infrastructure Initiative at M.I.T. and has served as the Co-Director of the Operations Research Center and the  Co-director of the Center for Transportation and Logistics, both at MIT.   She is an Area Editor for the Transportation Section of Operations Research, and has served as Associate Editor for Operations Research and for Transportation Science, as Director at Large for INFORMS, as President of the INFORMS Women in Operations Research/ Management Science Forum, and as the liaison between the INFORMS Transportation Science Section and the INFORMS Aviation Applications Special Interest Group.  Professor Barnhart has been awarded the Mitsui Faculty Development Chair, the Junior Faculty Career Award from the General Electric Foundation, the Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, the Transportation Science Best Paper Award and the Edelman Prize (2nd), both from the Institute of Operations Research and Management Science.