Dpt. of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Dpt. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
January 25, 2010, 14:00, Room GC B3 424 (click here for the map)
<p>As more airports in the United States and in Europe become congested, it also becomes increasingly likely that delays at one or more airports will spread to other parts of the network. We describe an analytical model, Airport Network Delays (AND), developed to study this complex phenomenon. It computes delays due to local congestion at individual airports and, more important, captures the "ripple effect" that leads to the propagation of local delays throughout the network. The model operates by iterating between a stochastic and dynamic queuing engine (QE) that computes delays at individual airports and a delay propagation algorithm that updates flight schedules at all the airports in the model in response to the local delays computed by the QE. </p><p> The AND model is fast computationally, making possible the exploration of the impacts of a large number of scenarios and policies on system-wide delays. It has been fully implemented for the network of the 34 busiest airports in the continental United States. An implementation for the network of the 34 busiest airports in Europe is in progress. The model provides insights into the complex interactions through which delays propagate through the network and the often-counterintuitive consequences of these interactions. (joint work with PhD student Nikolas Pyrgiotis)</p>
Amedeo R. Odoni is Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT and one of the Co-Directors of the Airline Industry Program. He has also served as Co-Director of the FAA's National Center of Excellence in Aviation Education, Co-Director of MIT's Operations Research Center, Editor-in- Chief of Transportation Science, and consultant to numerous international airport and aviation-related organizations and projects. The author, co-author or co-editor of eight books and more than 100 other technical publications, he is a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS) and has received several distinctions, among them the INFORMS Lifetime Achievement Award for Contributions to Transportation Science, the T. Wilson Endowed Chair at MIT, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) National Award for Excellence in Aviation Education, a Honorary Ph.D. from the Athens University of Economics and Business, and four MIT awards for excellence in teaching, mentoring and advising. His students have also received many prizes for their research and dissertations.