Special Issue: OR/MS and E-Business: E-Commerce and Operations Research in Airline Planning, Marketing, and Distribution

Many e-commerce principles were pioneered in the airline industry. These include the first business-to-business electronic information exchange and industry-wide electronic marketplace. This environment provided unprecedented opportunity for operations research (OR) modeling. By the mid-1980s airlines used customer shopping data to calibrate traveler demand and choice models, analyzed multi-channel product distribution strategies with simulation and practiced dynamic pricing through yield management. Airlines continue to derive billions of dollars annually from these and derivative models. The availability of reliable, low-cost communications via the Internet is not only providing new modeling challenges within the airline industry, but it is also providing similar opportunities in other industries.