A team of researchers from the University of Illinois has developed a set of aircraft-scheduling models that could help ease air travel frustrations.
The research was led by industrial and enterprise systems engineering professor Lavanya Marla.
By focusing on the early phases of flight schedule planning and delays at various scales, researchers have developed models to help create schedules that are less susceptible to delays and easier to fix once disrupted.
Researchers used historical data from US airlines to tweak aircraft routing to help prevent and minimize delays.
Aircraft routing refers to the route that a single aircraft takes between Federal Aviation Administration-mandated maintenance checks that typically occur on a 72-hour cycle and multiple flights.
The researchers constructed different models to help determine what kinds of solutions offer the most flexibility in reducing delay cascades. One set of models focuses on avoiding the outcomes of the worst-case delays only, and a second considers all kinds of delays that occur.
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By GlobalDataHaving the ability to control the less severe day-to-day delays proved most beneficial for passengers.
Researchers also examined the models by observing the percentage of flight delays and passenger disruptions caused by different kinds of delays.
Marla said: “There is an overwhelming amount of data generated from airline on-time performance records.
“It is challenging to find the best model to quantify the uncertainty in the aviation system in order to improve on-time performance and cost savings.
“Our research shows that the existing models are unable to distinguish the cascading downstream impact of one solution over another, which is critical to the airlines for decision-making.”
Dartmouth College engineering professor Vikrant Vaze and Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineering professor and chancellor Cynthia Barnhart are also involved in the research.
