Section 2 of the paper deals with the classical
problems of scheduling, routing, and crew assignment
in the airline industry. This is a context that
is perfectly suited to the use of large-scale, discrete
optimization approaches and, indeed, has motivated
several methodological and computational developments
in this vibrant area of OR over the years. Section
3 covers airline revenue management, including
overbooking, flight leg yield management and
network revenue maximization. Through a combination
of stochastic and optimization models, OR work
in this area has generated significant additional revenues
for the airlines ever since the late 1980s. Moreover,
revenue management continues to be a field in
which airlines are vying intensively for competitive
advantage. Section 4 surveys selected applications of
OR to the study, planning, and design of the two
major pieces of aviation infrastructure, the airports
system and the air traffic management (ATM) system.
Historically the emphasis here has been on stochastic
models, as the questions addressed have focused
on capacity, delays, and safety under conditions in
which the probabilistic characteristics of the input
parameters play a dominant role. However, optimization
models, both deterministic and stochastic, have
found use in the intensive recent research on air traf-
fic flow management, a topic also reviewed briefly
in §4. Finally, §5 summarizes the main conclusions
regarding the fundamental challenges faced by future
research.