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CTI Research News October 2008

As part of the research grant "From Tactical Planning to Operational Control - Bridging the Chasm", which is funded by CTI together with the Australian Research Council (ARC) to investigate robust airline scheduling, a team consisting of Sophie Dickson and Olivia Smith (both PhD Students at the University of Melbourne) and Wenkai Li (Monash University) are developing a solution to the Airline Disruption Management problem as part of the 2009 ROADEF Challenge (see http://challenge.roadef.org/2009/index.en.htm).

The ROADEF Challenge is a competition run biannually by the French Operational Research and Decision Support Society. The challenge exists to allow industry partners to witness recent developments in the field of Operations Research whilst providing researches with an opportunity to work on industrial sized projects. In 2009 the challenge focuses on disruption management for commercial airlines.

Commercial airlines create plans to operate a published schedule, with resources allocated prior to the day of operations. However, on the day of operations, external factors such as weather, staff illness and mechanical failures disrupt the planned operations making the original schedule infeasible. When this happens, the airline is required to reallocate resources and/or cancel or retime flights to minimise the impact of the disruption.

The team has developed an initial solution using Mixed Integer Programming techniques and some unique modelling approaches. Having passed the first round of qualification with this solution, the team is busily working through ideas to improve its effectiveness in time for the final phase which is due in early 2009.