This issue reports a project carried out at the University of Edinburgh. If you are interested in availing yourself of the opportunity to have a project to help your organisation please contact the OR Society at [email protected]
AIRPORT-ACCOUNTABLE RESILIENCE
(Matt Tench, University of Edinburgh, MA Business with Decision Analytics)
London Gatwick is the 8th busiest airport in Europe by annual passengers and 2nd busiest in the UK. With capacity reaching 55 flights per hour, London Gatwick has the most efficient single runway of any commercial airport globally.
After London Gatwick released a large number of new slots in 2014, the regulator (the Civil Aviation Authority) and London Gatwick's customers (the airlines) blamed a decrease in punctuality during 2014-16 on a perceived lack of ‘resilience’. London Gatwick has been working on enhancing its operational resilience ever since. Matt’s undergraduate dissertation was the fourth collaborative project run with the University of Edinburgh in this context and was by far the most impactful.
There were two key questions that the aviation industry needed answers to. Firstly, what ‘resilience’ is an airport operator accountable for in the first place? Secondly, how do you measure that? It is difficult to disentangle the contributions from multiple actors, as a single large airport is an ecosystem of hundreds of different organisations (airport operator, air navigation service providers, airlines, ground handlers, aircraft fuelling companies, etc.). Until the industry answers those two questions, ‘resilience improvement’ programmes are destined to fail.
To unravel the tangle, Matt developed the world's first method to isolate the resilience that an airport operator is accountable for, after a previous project identified boundaries where accountability is passed between airlines, airports, and airspace operators. Matt's method looks at historical data on a flight-by-flight basis, with a formal test to classify every movement as either ‘resilient’ or not. From there, data visualisation techniques pinpoint relevant subsets of operations to an analyst that need additional scrutiny, leading to further problem solving and well-targeted investment in improving resilience.
Matt devised the resilience tests directly out of fundamental principles of operations management (grounded in queueing theory) and found a very effective way to convey the results and insights from the tests through two novel charts (the ‘resilience pipe’ and ‘resilience square’).
Gavin Sillitto, Main Runway Optimisation Programme Lead at London Gatwick, comments: ‘Over the course of the four projects with the University of Edinburgh, we have fundamentally altered our understanding of resilience, from meaning either “redundant capacity” or having suitable plans to deal with specific “major events,” to dealing with the kinds of difficult day to day conditions that any airport can face, whatever the cause. This changes our mindset from having the capacity to deal with the busiest day of the summer, to delivering an excellent customer experience on every day of the year’.
‘The aviation industry's focus on on-time performance and identifying causes of delay as a starting point, leads to exceptionally high effort on data capture and validation. Matt's tests and visualisation methods allow us to bypass the “blame game” and move straight to actionable insights about the parts of the operation we can impact. As such, London Gatwick have designed their new Aerodrome Continuous Improvement Cycle around this new capability’.