Disruption management in airline operations control: an intelligent agent-based approach

Operations control is one of the most important areas for an airline company. Through operations control mechanisms an airline company monitors all the flights checking if they follow the schedule that was previously defined by other areas of the company. Unfortunately, some problems may arise during this stage (Clausen et al., 2005). Those problems can be related with crewmembers, aircrafts and passengers. The Airline Operations Control Centre (AOCC) includes teams of experts specialized in solving the above problems under the supervision of an operation control manager. Each team has a specific goal contributing to the common and general goal of having the airline operation running under as few problems as possible. The process of solving these kinds of problems is known as Disruption Management (Kohl et al., 2004) or Operations Recovery