Introduction to the Special Issue on Aviation Operations Research: Commemorating 100 Years of Aviation

Abstract

One hundred years ago amid the dunes on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Orville Wright piloted a gasoline-powered aircraft down a single iron track. That aircraft lifted into the air, flew 120 feet, and came to a controlled landing. This flight represented the result of five years of research and experiments by two bicycle makers, Wilbur and Orville Wright. The Wright brothers developed fundamental aviation technologies that are still in use in more advanced form today, including an aileron, rudder, and elevator. Probably more important to their ultimate success was that they viewed the aircraft as a system that had to dynamically adjust to variations in conditions that could arise during flight. Competing, better-funded efforts to develop heavier-than-air flying machines did not meet the Wright brothers’ success, largely because of their lack of a comprehensive dynamic control system. The Wright brothers used the control of a bicycle as their model, noting that one must constantly adapt weight distribution, steering, and speed to keep the bike upright during travel. Thus, in many respects the Wright brothers’ achievement can be viewed as a success for systems engineering. Of course, over the years the aircraft has developed substantially, evolving into today’s large, powerful jet. Yet, more impressive than the aircraft itself may be the systems surrounding the provision of services based on it. These include the passenger and freight air transport networks; airline-reservation systems; passenger-, crew-, and fleet-scheduling systems; maintenance operations; package-sorting systems; baggage-handling systems; etc. Operations research has played a fundamental role in the development of these systems, and their analysis has led to many important developments in the field of operations research. In fact, it can be argued that air transport systems have played a leading role in fostering the development of operations research. Air crew scheduling was one of the first real applications of integer programming. By the early 1980s, most air carriers had implemented crew-scheduling systems based on the exact or approximate solutions of integer-programming representations of this problem. Air crew scheduling motivated much of the early developments on the set-partitioning problem and continues to challenge research in the area today. The airline industry pioneered the development of the field of yield management. Yield management is credited with increasing the revenues of the airline industry by as much as 8%. Today yield management represents one of the most vibrant research areas within operations research, and applications within a broad range of industries are now underway. The importance of operations research to aviation spurred the early development of OR groups within most major airlines. In fact, the airlines have their own operations research society: AGIFORS. The strong link between operations research and aviation makes it very natural and perhaps mandatory to commemorate the Wright brothers’ first flight with a special issue of Transportation Science. Transportation Science is the leading operations research journal dedicated to the analysis of transportation systems. No special call for papers was released for this special issue. Rather, one overview paper was commissioned, and a set of papers was selected from the publication queue. It is a testament to the vibrancy of the field of aviation operations research that such a high-quality set of papers could be assembled from the publication queue.