Airline disruption management—Perspectives, experiences and outlook

Since the deregulation of many markets, airlines have become more concerned with developing an optimal flight schedule, allowing little slack to accommodate variations from the optimal solution. During operation, the planned schedules often have to be revised because of disruptions caused by severe weather, technical problems and crew sickness. Thus, airline disruption management techniques have emerged. The purpose is, first to offer an introduction to airline disruption management, provide a description of the planning processes, and deliver a detailed overview of the numerous aspects of airline disruption management. Second, it is to report on experiences from a development project on airline disruption management that is the first prototype of a multiple resource decision support system at the operations control center in a major airline to be implemented.