DESCARTES - Decision Support for Integrated Crew and Aircraft Recovery

DESCARTES addresses the problem of disruption management for large
airlines. This is considered one of the most important and hardest
problems to deal with in todays planning procedures in the airline
industry. The goal of the project has been to develop a prototype tool
enabling the airlines to integrate the management of aircrafts and
staff when replanning immediately before a flight due to last minute
changes.
The project has progressed in an incremental fashion developing a
number of individual recovery systems for aircraft, crew, and
passengers as well as a system enabling these to collaborate when
generation potential solutions for a disruption. Each of the
individual systems are useful as a stand-alone system enabling the
project to give early business benefit to the industrial partner and
to the software vendor participating.
A number of different approaches has been tested in the development
process: heuristics, constraint programming, and traditional
mathematical programming methods. Also, different approaches to
solution techniques for the integration of recovery systems has been
tested: the Integrated Sequential Recovery method consisting of the
individual subsystems collaboration through a well-defined interface
to retrieve options, and the Tailored Integration approach, in which
the generation of potential solutions is influenced by the current
situation for crew and aircraft concurrently.
The results of the project now form the basis of a number of
commercial products marketed by Carmen System AB.