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Solving Airline Operations Problems Using Specialized Agents in a Distributed Multi-Agent System

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Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2007)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 12))

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Abstract

An airline schedule very rarely operates as planned. Problems related with aircrafts, crew members and passengers are common and the actions towards the solution of these problems are usually known as operations recovery. The Airline Operations Control Center (AOCC) tries to solve these problems with the minimum cost and satisfying all the required rules. In this paper we present the implementation of a Distributed Multi-Agent System (MAS) representing the existing roles in an AOCC. This MAS deals with several operational bases and for each type of operation problems it has several specialized software agents that implement different algorithms (heuristic, AI, OR, etc.), competing to find the best solution for each problem. We present a real case study taken from an AOCC where a crew recovery problem is solved. Computational results using a real airline schedule are presented, including a comparison with a solution for the same problem found by the human operators in the AOCC. We show that, even in simple problems and when comparing with solutions found by human operators, it is possible to find valid solutions, in less time and with a smaller cost.

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Castro, A.J.M., Oliveira, E. (2008). Solving Airline Operations Problems Using Specialized Agents in a Distributed Multi-Agent System. In: Filipe, J., Cordeiro, J., Cardoso, J. (eds) Enterprise Information Systems. ICEIS 2007. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 12. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-88710-2_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-88710-2_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-88709-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-88710-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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