Quantifying Quality Operational Costs in a Multi-Agent System for Airline Operations Recovery

When recovering from operational problems, the Airline Operations Control Centre (AOCC) usually tries to minimize direct operational costs while satisfying all the required rules. In this paper we present the implementation of a Distributed Multi-Agent System (MAS) representing the existing real-life roles in an AOCC. This MAS includes software agents that cooperate through a distributed problem solving approach, to find the best solution for each problem. We propose a general approach to quantify quality operational costs, so that passengers’ satisfaction can also be considered in the final decision. We present a real case study to introduce our approach to quantify the quality operational costs and solve several real unexpected crew problems. We show that our MAS with quality costs is able to reduce flight delays and increase passenger satisfaction without increasing significantly the direct operational costs. A comparison with two other methods is presented. Copyright © 2007 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. All rights reserved.