An official website of the United States government
The airline industry faces many causes of disruption. To minimise financial and reputational impact, the airline must adapt its schedules. Due to the complexity of the environment, simulation is a natural modelling approach. However, the large solution space, time constraints and system constraints make the search for revised schedules difficult. This paper presents a method for the aircraft recovery problem that uses multi-fidelity modelling including a trust region simulation optimisation algorithm to mitigate the computational costs of using high-fidelity simulations with its benefits for providing good estimates of the true performance.
more »
« less
A multi-fidelity modelling approach for airline disruption management using simulation
Disruption is a serious and common problem for the airline industry. High utilisation of aircraft and airport resources mean that disruptive events can have large knock-on effects for the rest of the schedule. The airline must rearrange their schedule to reduce the impact. The focus in this paper is on the Aircraft Recovery Problem. The complexity and uncertainty involved in the industry makes this a difficult problem to solve. Many deterministic modelling approaches have been proposed, but these struggle to handle the inherent variability in the problem. This paper proposes a multi-fidelity modelling framework, enabling uncertain elements of the environment to be included within the decision making process. We combine a deterministic integer program to find initial solutions and a novel simulation optimisation procedure to improve these solutions. This allows the solutions to be evaluated whilst accounting for the uncertainty of the problem. The empirical evaluation suggests that the combination consistently finds good rescheduling options.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1854562
- PAR ID:
- 10335100
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of the Operational Research Society
- ISSN:
- 0160-5682
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 14
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
In this paper, we aim to address a relevant estimation problem that aviation professionals encounter in their daily operations. Specifically, aircraft load planners require information on the expected number of checked bags for a flight several hours prior to its scheduled departure to properly palletize and load the aircraft. However, the checked baggage prediction problem has not been sufficiently studied in the literature, particularly at the flight level. Existing prediction approaches have not properly accounted for the different impacts of overestimating and underestimating checked baggage volumes on airline operations. Therefore, we propose a custom loss function, in the form of a piecewise quadratic function, which aligns with airline operations practice and utilizes machine learning algorithms to optimize checked baggage predictions incorporating the new loss function. We consider multiple linear regression, LightGBM, and XGBoost, as supervised learning algorithms. We apply our proposed methods to baggage data from a major airline and additional data from various U.S. government agencies. We compare the performance of the three customized supervised learning algorithms. We find that the two gradient boosting methods (i.e., LightGBM and XGBoost) yield higher accuracy than the multiple linear regression; XGBoost outperforms LightGBM while LightGBM requires much less training time than XGBoost. We also investigate the performance of XGBoost on samples from different categories and provide insights for selecting an appropriate prediction algorithm to improve baggage prediction practices. Our modeling framework can be adapted to address other prediction challenges in aviation, such as predicting the number of standby passengers or no-shows.more » « less
-
From the start, the airline industry has remarkably connected countries all over the world through rapid long-distance transportation, helping people overcome geographic barriers. Consequently, this has ushered in substantial economic growth, both nationally and internationally. The airline industry produces vast amounts of data, capturing a diverse set of information about their operations, including data related to passengers, freight, flights, and much more. Analyzing air travel data can advance the understanding of airline market dynamics, allowing companies to provide customized, efficient, and safe transportation services. Due to big data challenges in such a complex environment, the benefits of drawing insights from the air travel data in the airline industry have not yet been fully explored. This article aims to survey various components and corresponding proposed data analysis methodologies that have been identified as essential to the inner workings of the airline industry. We introduce existing data sources commonly used in the papers surveyed and summarize their availability. Finally, we discuss several potential research directions to better harness airline data in the future. We anticipate this study to be used as a comprehensive reference for both members of the airline industry and academic scholars with an interest in airline research.more » « less
-
Digital twin is a vital enabling technology for smart manufacturing in the era of Industry 4.0. Digital twin effectively replicates its physical asset enabling easy visualization, smart decision-making and cognitive capability in the system. In this paper, a framework of dynamic data driven digital twin for complex engineering products was proposed. To illustrate the proposed framework, an example of health management on aircraft engines was studied. This framework models the digital twin by extracting information from the various sensors and Industry Internet of Things (IIoT) monitoring the remaining useful life (RUL) of an engine in both cyber and physical domains. Then, with sensor measurements selected from linear degradation models, a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network is proposed to dynamically update the digital twin, which can estimate the most up-to-date RUL of the physical aircraft engine. Through comparison with other machine learning algorithms, including similarity based linear regression and feed forward neural network, on RUL modelling, this LSTM based dynamical data driven digital twin provides a promising tool to accurately replicate the health status of aircraft engines. This digital twin based RUL technique can also be extended for health management and remote operation of manufacturing systems.more » « less
-
Scheduling appliances is a challenging and interesting problem aimed at reducing energy consumption at a residential level. Previous work on appliance scheduling for smart homes assumes that user preferences have no uncertainty. In this paper, we study two approaches to address this problem when user preferences are uncertain. More specifically, we assume that user preferences in turning on or off a device are represented by Normal distributions. The first approach uses sample average approximation, a mathematical model, in computing a schedule. The second one relies on the fact that a scheduling problem could be viewed as a constraint satisfaction problem and uses depth-first search to identify a solution. We also conduct an experimental evaluation of the two approaches to investigate the scalability of each approach in different problem variants. We conclude by discussing computational challenges of our approaches and some possible directions for future work.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1080/01605682.2021.1971574
