Approaches to Operative Decision Support in the Management of Aircraft Turnaround Disruptions

With the availability of comprehensively integrated Airport Operational Databases, as motivated by the emergence of Collaborative Decision Making for example, new forms of automated information processing become available: Particularly, proactive Decision Support Systems can be developed based on the concepts of Artificial Intelligence. From various potential fields of application, this paper focuses on the problem of managing disruptions within the aircraft turnaround, the most typical airport ground process. With a view to supporting respective system development intentions, it describes the results of the evaluation of several approaches towards the operative provision of decision support: Particularly, strengths and limitations of simulation, planning and scheduling are discussed in the regarded context. Based on the respective findings, it is finally shown how the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP) – the most promising approach in our view – can be extended for its application to aircraft turnaround disruption management.