Analyzing Airline Scheduling Processes based on real Data

Abstract

Airline scheduling is a complex process that starts years before the actual flight and involves several organizational entities within the airline company. The result of this process is a schedule that determines aircraft and crew rotations throughout a period of time in order to satisfy passenger demand. Scheduling data analyses are often limited to measuring differences between the schedule and its actual operation or between planned and actual block times respectively. One reason for this is the comparatively high availability of the required data. Questions answered by those analyses might be: How much delay has occured during the operation of a schedule? To what extent is a schedule able to absorb delays in crew or aircraft rotations? The German Aerospace Center (DLR) currently carries out the research project ROFL (German: Robuster Flugplan, English: robust schedule) that aims at identifying and developing efficient procedures for creating robust schedules. In other words, one objective is the improvement of scheduling processes in terms of efficiency. The second is the identification or development of schedule designs for increased robustness. The first mentioned objective can only be achieved if one is familiar with practical scheduling processes at airlines. Therefore, real process data – acquired by several European airlines – is employed in order to reproduce and analyze airline scheduling activities. In this paper, we present selected analyses that were carried out and the results that were obtained.