Studying the Impact of the Organizational Structure on Airline Operations Control

This chapter introduces work practice modeling and simulation as a mean to assess and evolve the airline organizational structure performance. It departs from the empirical knowledge conveyed through interviews with airline operators and builds an analytical infrastructure geared toward evaluating the current and hypothetical organizational structures. To better reproduce the operational control challenges faced by airline companies it uses real pre- and postoperational data containing scheduled flights, delay codes and aircraft, and crew rosters. By the end of the research study, the simulation of the same operational scenario across four distinct organizational structures demonstrated improvements of up to 15% in disruption handling time and of up to 21% in collaborator stress.

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