System and method for controlling operation of an airline

#This application claims priority under 35 U.S.C. §119 to British Patent Application No. 11203080, filed Nov. 24, 2011, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference.

#Operators in an Airline Operations Center (AOC) of a major airline manage the execution of thousands of flights a day and adjust in real time the movements of the aircraft and crewmembers of the airline to minimize costly delays and cancellations, while complying with complex maintenance and routing constraints. These operators are responsible for preparing flight plans, adjusting the airline schedule including but not limited to flight schedule, departure slot assignments, aircraft assignments and crew assignments in response to various factors such as thunderstorms and equipment failures. A challenge for major airlines is to limit inefficiency in the airline and manage information efficiently to alleviate the impact of unforeseen schedule disruptions. The future ramifications of an aircraft failure on related, interdependent, and unrelated flights or routes in an airline network is very complex, especially future ramifications that may impact multiple routes after one or more legs of the route are executed. The AOC is a very busy environment and where decisions must be made quickly. The combination of the complex ramifications and the short time frame in which to make decisions in response to an aircraft failure makes it practically impossible for aircraft operations personnel to understand the full downstream impacts of a decision. The decisions made by the aircraft operations personnel may have great operational and economic impacts on the airline.

#In one embodiment, an airline operations control system for an airline having multiple aircraft and multiple routes formed by one or more flights, which are implemented by the aircraft flying the flights forming the routes, includes a computer searchable database, a query module configured to query the database for and output stable operating solutions that ensure completion of the multiple routes based on at least one failure of at least one aircraft flying one of the routes, and a learning module presenting at least a subset of the stable operating solutions to airline operation personnel for selection, learning the selection preferences over time, and controlling future selection of the presented subset of the stable operating solutions based on the learning, wherein the learning module is executed on a computer configured to access the stable operations outputted by the query module.

#In the drawings:

#FIG. 1 is a schematic view of an airline and information that may be used in a method of controlling operation of the airline according to an embodiment of the invention.

#FIG. 2 is a schematic view of an airline operations control system according to another embodiment of the invention.

#An initial explanation of an airline environment and the problems faced when aircraft operations personnel make decisions will provide useful. As airline networks may have hundreds of aircraft and thousands of crewmembers and extensive maintenance operations within their purview and take into consideration a wide variety of information it will be understood that FIG. 1 only schematically illustrates a very simplified version of an airline and the information which may be taken into consideration. However, for simplicity of explanation, the airline of FIG. 1 is useful to explain the inventive concepts without undue complexity. More specifically, an airline having three aircraft 10, 12, and 14, which are currently located at a first airport 20 and may fly to either a second airport 22 or a third airport 24 and an AOC 26 are illustrated. While the aircraft 10, 12, and 14 are illustrated as being identical it will be appreciated that the aircraft 10, 12, and 14 may be different makes and models, with differing functionality and capacity, and thus may not necessarily be swapped with each other. As aircraft have planned routes, we will assume in our explanation that aircraft 10 is supposed to fly from airport 20 to airport 24 and then to airport 22, aircraft 12 is supposed to fly from airport 20 to airport 24 and back to airport 20, and aircraft 14 is supposed to fly to airport 24.

#For purposes of simplicity in this explanation the aircraft operations personnel at the AOC 26 may only look at the availability of a part to fix a fault in the aircraft, the availability of a shop at the corresponding airport to fix the aircraft, the availability of a crew to fly the aircraft, and the availability of an alternative plane to be swapped with the faulty aircraft. For example, these considerations are shown for each of the airports 20, 22, and 24 at the bottom of FIG. 1. The availability of each is shown to change with time as it will be understood that the various resources may not always be available at each of the airports 20, 22, and 24. In fact, some airports may be unable to handle certain faults at all. By way of non-limiting example, a particular airport may not have a high enough lift to work on a tail section of a large aircraft and thus may be unable to handle a fault with the tail section.

#For purposes of this explanation it may be understood that all the aircraft 10, 12, and 14 are at airport 20 at the same time and that aircraft 10 will be the first to leave the airport 20 and that flights on aircraft 12 and 14 are not scheduled to leave until several hours later. Before it leaves, aircraft 10 may have a fault occur with no warning that essentially disables the aircraft 10. At this point, if there were no other aircraft, the aircraft operations personnel of the AOC 26 may have very limited options to either delay the flight and fix the problem at airport 20 assuming the availability of the part and the shop or cancel the flight, which may result in large costs to the airline. However, because aircraft 12 and 14 are not scheduled to leave for several hours the operator of the AOC 26 may choose to simply swap aircraft 14 for aircraft 10 and attempt to fix aircraft 10 before the flight originally scheduled for aircraft 14 is supposed to leave. Such a swap may only be an option if the aircraft 14 and the aircraft 10 are similar in size and may accommodate the same number of passengers and if the requisite parts and shop capacity or personnel are available.