DOGMA : A Diversion Management Decision - Support System in Airline Operations

This paper will describe the Diversion OffGate Management Assistant (DOGMA) system, a decision-support tool that uses airline-articulated policies to critique dispatcher initiated diversion decisions to ensure that these plans will not only maintain safe operating practices, but will also go further toward providing decision makers with the broad and diverse set of concerns from various stakeholders in their diversion decisions. Diversion management is the decision of which incoming flights to divert and where to divert them to in the face of reduced landing capacity at original destination airports. Multiple airline operational departments can be negatively impacted by diversion decisions that can have complex consequences due to the interdependent nature of resources and schedules; however, current practice typically involves only minimal consideration of how diversion decision will impact airline operations due to time pressures and inadequate situation awareness resulting from the difficulty of acquiring and analyzing the relevant data. Policy is used to capture the goals and priorities of all stakeholders that currently do not have a prominent voice in diversion decisions. DOGMA is a policy-based system that interacts with the user via a critiquing approach in which dispatchers' input to a diversion plan is reviewed by a computer partner that offers feedback on the potential solutions and their ramifications for all stakeholders. The impact of this increased awareness and broader input into the diversion decision should be better and more consistent diversion decisions that minimize the negative impact of diversions and improve an airline's ability to recover from severe schedule disruptions.