Well, today is the last day for my application portfolio and last few hours before I hand over my exam. The phone rings and it’s my wife – Can you pick me up from the airport at 7:30pm? I say – why not? With a hidden hope that her flight gets delayed for an hour or two, I continued giving final touches to my application portfolio, cleaning up the grammar and other knick knacks. And then it happened!

How difficult would it be to schedule aircraft landing and takeoff at busy airports such as Atlanta? Captured by this thought, I quickly made my way to Wikipedia to gather some basic information. Atlanta’s Hartsfield International airport has 5 runways, 151 domestic and 28 international gates. It is the worlds busiest airport by passenger traffic as well as landings and take offs. Aha!! It had 994,346 flight movements in 2007 (a world record).

If I were to take up the assignment of scheduling the landings and take offs for my final project, how would it look like. First,I would have looked at what I want to achieve. Probably, minimum delays would be one objective. Then I would have thought of my decision variables – something like when will a particular flight take off, or when will it land, or when should it leave the departure gate (assuming the time it will take on the tarmac as constant). Then would come the constraints, many of them. Wow…even thinking of them makes me scared. Some would be, a flight should not be incoming, it has spent X amount of time at the gate, movement time after landing, and so on. There are so many uncertainties associated with this modeling. I could think of then doing a Monte Carlo simulation to simulate the incoming and departure of aircrafts. Something like a Poisson distribution may have helped.

A few minutes of thought and I feel glad that I did not broach this subject when discussing my final project. Something tells me that with the tools and resources we have, this simulation would probably have been very difficult and my poor team mates would have put me on the next flight to India.