A Negotiation Based Approach to Airline Operations Recovery

Abstract. The Airline Operations Control Centre (AOCC) organiza-tion is responsible for monitoring and solving operational problems in day-to-day airline operations. It includes human expert teams special-ized in solving problems related with aircrafts, crew members, and pas-sengers, in a process called disruption management or operations re-covery. We present a new and innovative negotiation-based approach to solve these problems, replacing traditional AOCC expert teams with intelligent agents in a cooperative multi-agent system (MAS). Human interaction focuses on supervision and critical decision actions, such as final approval of proposed solutions. The main research goal is to find the best solution for each problem in an integrated, dynamic and dis-tributed way, by developing agents with their own objectives that work together to minimize the disruptions ’ effects in the operational plan. Our prototypes, implementing the described approach, led to experiments us-ing real airline data, with problems and solutions validated by experts. Results are presented and discussed