The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been honored by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®) for improvements to the nation's ground delay system that have speeded up air travel and resulted in $150 million in savings to airlines.
INFORMS conducted a competition for the Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences at its national convention in Salt Lake City earlier this month. The six finalists for the award, all of whom were recognized by the judges, were Air New Zealand, Fingerhut, the Federal Aviation Administration, IBM, Jeppesen Sanderson, and Ford Motor. The winner of the Edelman Award was Jeppesen Sanderson.
INFORMS recognized the FAA for a study entitled "Ground Delay Program Enhancements Under Collaborative Decision Making." The authors are Michael C. Wambsganss, Midori Tanino, Kan Chang, and Lara Shisler, Metron, Inc.; Kenneth Howard, Arcorn Corp.; and Rick Oiesen, Volpe National Transportation Systems Center.
The Ground Delay Program Enhancement (GDPE) project under Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) allocates arrival slots to aircraft at airports during time periods when demand exceeds capacity. Decision makers at the FAA and the airlines use the GDPE suite of tools to keep congestion at an arrival airport at acceptable levels by issuing ground delays to aircraft before departure. GDPE started prototype operations on January 20, 1998, at two airports. By September 8, 1998, operations had been expanded to include all airports in the United States. The uniqueness of the GDPE project is the wide range of organizations - the FAA and participating air carriers - that have benefited from this effort over the last two years.
GDPE significantly reduced delays due to compression. Compression is a process that is run periodically throughout the duration of a Ground Delay Program (GDP). It reduces overall delay by identifying open arrival slots due to flight cancellations or delays and fills in the vacant slots by moving up operating flights that can utilize those slots. From January 20, 1998 through January 31, 2000, almost 90,000 hours of scheduled delay have been avoided due to compression. The Air Transport Association estimates that every minute of delays costs an airline $29; therefore, compression benefits have resulted in a cost savings of more than $150 million in cost savings to the airline industry. GDPE has also improved the flow of air traffic into airports; improved compliance to controlled times of departure; improved data quality and predictability; resulted in equity in delays across carriers; and often avoided the necessity to implement FAA ground delay programs, which can be disruptive to air carrier operations.
29th Year of Competition
This is the 29th year that the prestigious $15,000 competition has been held. The award is jointly sponsored by INFORMS and CPMS, the Practice Section of INFORMS.
The INFORMS Edelman Award recognizes outstanding implemented work that has had a significant, positive impact on the performance of the client organization. The top finalist receives a $10,000 first prize.
The judges of the Edelman competition were Russ Labe; Joseph Discenza, Wagner & Associates; Howard Finkelberg, BBDO; H. Newton Garber, Garber Associates; Stephen C. Graves, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Yoshiro Ikura, Saitech; Peter C. Bell, University of Western Ontario; and Donald Smith, Lucent Technologies.
All the finalist papers will be published in the January 2001 issue of Interfaces: An International Journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.
The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®) is an international scientific society with 12,000 members, including Nobel Prize laureates, dedicated to applying scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management, and operations. Members of INFORMS work in business, government, and academia. They are represented in fields as diverse as airlines, health care, law enforcement, the military, the stock market, and telecommunications. The INFORMS website is at http://www.informs.org.