The System Design

In Chapter 4 we introduced the Airline Scheduling Problem and the Airline Operations Control Problem. We have described the AOCC organization and its roles as well as the typical problems that appear during the execution of the operational plan. The disruption management process used by airlines was presented as well as the main costs involved in generating and evaluating the solutions. In this chapter we present our new approach to disruption management in the airline domain, including how we represent the AOCC using a Multi-Agent System (MAS), a computational organization of intelligent agents and the negotiation protocol with adaptive characteristics that we use as a decision mechanism. Besides providing new or updated processes and mechanisms for the AOCC we also aim to focus on the AOCC as an entity, trying to change the way AOCCs are setup and organized and not only in providing DSS tools. Our main focus in this chapter is on the conceptual aspects of our approach.