air transport associations are currently represented in
AGIFORS, the Airline Group of Operational Research
Societies, which has been active since 1961. Indeed,
it is difficult to think of any single sector, other than
perhaps military operations, with which operations
research has been linked more closely. One of the reasons
is that airline operations and, more generally,
the air transport environment provide natural contexts
for the application of OR techniques and models.
A second is that the airline industry has consistently
been a leader in the use of information technology
and has relied heavily on the intensive use of computers
over the years.
The objective of this paper is to present a historical
perspective on the contributions of operations
research to the air transport industry, as well as to
offer an assessment of some of the challenges that will
be confronted next. Any reasonably thorough coverage
of this subject would probably require an entire
issue of this journal because the number of OR papers
published on air transport easily exceeds 1,000 over
the last 50 years. In view of the severe constraints
on its length, the scope of the paper will instead be
confined to a selected subset of air transport-related
topics, where operations research has made some