This book reviews operations research theory, applications and practice in airline planning and operations. It examines the business and technical landscape, details best practices, and identifies open questions and areas for future research.

This book reviews Operations Research theory, applications and practice in seven major areas of airline planning and operations. In each area, a team of academic and industry experts provides an overview of the business and technical landscape, a view of current best practices, a summary of open research questions and suggestions for relevant future research. There are several common themes in current airline Operations Research efforts. First is a growing focus on the customer in terms of: 1) what they want; 2) what they are willing to pay for services; and 3) how they are impacted by planning, marketing and operational decisions. Second, as algorithms improve and computing power increases, the scope of modeling applications expands, often re-integrating processes that had been broken into smaller parts in order to solve them in the past. Finally, there is a growing awareness of the uncertainty in many airline planning and operational processes and decisions. Airlines now recognize the need to develop ‘robust’ solutions that effectively cover many possible outcomes, not just the best case, “blue sky” scenario. Individual chapters cover: Customer Modeling methodologies, including current and emerging applications. Airline Planning and Schedule Development, with a look at many remaining open research questions. Revenue Management, including a view of current business and technical landscapes, as well as suggested areas for future research. Airline Distribution -- a comprehensive overview of this newly emerging area. Crew Management Information Systems, including a review of recent algorithmic advances, as well as the development of information systems that facilitate the integration of crew management modeling with airline planning and operations. Airline Operations, with consideration of recent advances and successes in solving the airline operations problem. Air Traffic Flow Management, including the modeling environment and opportunities for both Air Traffic Flow Management and the airlines.

This book chronicles airline revenue management from its early origins to the last frontier. Since its inception revenue management has now become an integral part of the airline business process for competitive advantage. The field has progressed from inventory control of the base fare, to managing bundles of base fare and air ancillaries, to the precise inventory control at the individual seat level. The author provides an end-to-end view of pricing and revenue management in the airline industry covering airline pricing, advances in revenue management, availability, and air shopping, offer management and product distribution, agency revenue management, impact of revenue management across airline planning and operations, and emerging technologies is travel. The target audience of this book is practitioners who want to understand the basics and have an end-to-end view of revenue management.

This book presents new methods and approaches to real-world problems as well as exploratory research that describes novel artificial intelligence applications, including deep learning, neural networks and hybrid algorithms. This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Artificial Intelligence Trends in Intelligent Systems Section of the 6th Computer Science On-line Conference 2017 (CSOC 2017), held in April 2017.

Provision of air navigation services entered a new era of performance scheme. The performance scheme provides binding targets on four key performance areas of safety, capacity, environment and cost-efficiency. It is imposed that targets are fully achieved, but it is not prescribed how, this being typical for the performance based and goal oriented regulation. Those key performance areas are interlaced by proportional and inversely proportional interdependencies. Namely, for example and simplified into one sentence; if one aims to increase sector capacity with existing human resources (constant staff costs) and not investing into the technology (constant support cost) to achieve improved cost-efficiency of service provision, the resulting overloaded system might unlock the Pandora box of latent safety issues. Since failure is not an option, we - the general, migrating and traveling public, airspace users, airport operators, air navigation services providers and the economy - will gain attaining the goals of performance scheme in the process. However, un-answered cardinal question is what is the winning strategy? This book provides do-not-forget-peculiarities insight into the elements of new business model of air navigation services provision as evolution of the latter became essential.

This book examines the role and utility of competition law within the EU’s legislative and regulatory dialogue, using its response to crisis conditions as a test of its aims and abilities. As such, its main conclusion is that competition policy acts as a forum for debate as to the direction of the European integration project, while competition law can serve as a tool for aiding in the implementation of broader policy objectives. The analysis here explores the role of the general economic context in the application of competition law, the existence of identifiable baselines applicable in crisis conditions, the ability and role of national competition authorities in applying competition law, and the ways in which the European Commission’s overarching policy goals can influence the application of competition law. The decision to take an empirical approach to this research project stems from a conviction that an investigation into the real world situations faced by firms and consumers should underpin the evaluation of the applicable legal rules. Over the past number of years, the Commission has exerted more and more influence over the development of the regional and global airline industry, and this book identifies the emergence of an apparent overarching aim on the part of the Commission to create a market with a handful of ultra-competitive airlines with international reach serviced by an array of smaller feeder airlines on a regional basis. The study of Irish beef processing, on the other hand, identifies a high level of government involvement in providing the strategic thinking behind a crisis cartel scheme, and then demonstrates how the economic context exerted considerably more pressure on the government and the national court than on the competition authorities involved.