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Airlines Recover with the Help of Professor Gang Yu
As America reeled from the emotional shock of the events of September 11, the nation’s telecommunications and transportation systems scrambled to restore normal operations. The nationwide closure of airports was a particularly overwhelming challenge, with thousands of flight cancellations displacing tens of thousands of passengers. Never before had the airline industry faced the job of getting an entire fleet airborne again with no idea as to when the airports would reopen.
While other airlines floundered, Continental responded in record time by deploying a decision support system developed by Gang Yu, a professor of MSIS in the McCombs School. A longtime researcher of real-time operations control and disruption management, Yu has focused his work on the variable and dynamic environment that characterizes the airline industry. Yu’s Solver applications that reschedule aircraft, pilots, and flights had been used very successfully in dealing with past catastrophes like snowstorms and floods.
The gravity of the situation on September 11, however, called for calculations never before anticipated. Yu’s system rescheduled Continental’s fleets in only 20 hours, a task that if performed manually would have taken 250 hours. The system also kept Continental employees in the loop by sending them updated information via e-mail and pagers.
In the months since the tragedy, the Solver applications have created an entirely new schedule to accommodate cuts in flights and personnel. Aside from ultimately restoring order from chaos, Yu’s recovery plan saved Continental several million dollars.
His work is poised to have an even wider impact as his generic framework and methodologies for managing disruptions are applied to the supply chain management, manufacturing, and telecommunications arenas.
Gang Yu is the Jack G. Taylor Professor in Business in the McCombs School’s Department of Management Science and Information Systems. Yu received UT’s Research Excellence Award in 2001, and was honored as Outstanding Young Scientist by the National Science Foundation of China in 1999. He and his research team were recently named finalists for the Franz Edelman Prize, the highest award in operations research, for their airline disruption management applications.
Read more about Continental’s timely recovery in a November 12, 2001
Information Week story, “IT’s Critical Role in
Airlines”.
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