The Airline Operations Control Problem

Abstract

Chapter 3 was mainly about the state of the art in airline operations’ disruption management and related fields.We have additionally proposed a possible classification encompassing the existing work within this field. This chapter is about the main application domain we are interested in and the knowledge it entails. The information provided here is the result of the observation and interviews we have done at TAP Portugal1 Airline Operations Control Center (AOCC), complemented with information from related literature. As we stated in Chapter 1 and considering the line of research we chose to follow, it is important to have a rigorous description of the real application domain scenario as well as the problem to be solved. This chapter is a source of empirical knowledge, that will help the reader to understand both.We will introduce the AOCC organization and how it works, the type of problems that the AOCC human operators have to solve as well as the most common solutions and methods used therefore. Some real statistical data from TAP Portugal will be presented as well as the main costs involved in possible solutions.