3 ms·

As others have said, you are ridiculously oversimplifying the process. If you are running a little video game that plots flight charts, sure perhaps you could

As others have said, you are ridiculously oversimplifying the process. If you are running a little video game that plots flight charts, sure perhaps you could write such a script. You cannot, however, script a bunch of logisitics support together across disparate, independent, multinational airports. Add the obligitary paperwork (we don't really want to be shipping people around in coffins, enabling human trafficking or illegal substance smuggling, trust me), and add your standard bit of managerial incompetence managed from an excel document and sharepoint, and it's actually downright impressive if it's only a couple days to completely reboot the system. Arguably, management doing the standard "oh that will never happen" is probably why it's not even better - you would think the airports would be able to automatically "fix" themselves with a self healing protocol, but that was probably deemed too expensive and left out of the feature set.

amluto 4y ago
Of course I’m oversimplifying the process. But my point is the actual number of flights, passenger and luggage loads and unloads, etc can be a lot lower than a normal workload. On a normal day, an average Southwest plane flies quite a few hops, loads many passengers, unloads many passengers, etc. For a worst case reset, the normal routing doesn’t need to be followed. Of course this will introduce complexity. But it will also need decently less than a normal day’s number of operations. If I were designing a solver for where to move aircraft and crews (which is apparently what SkySolver does), I would test it on random and malicious inputs. If it’s initialized with every crew member and every plane at an independent random airport in the US (where Southwest has service) with a few broken for good measure and a few airports shut down, it should still find a solution. Waiting 12-24 hours to start so none of the crew is timed out could be part of a valid solution.
- bfung 4y ago
  It’s still probably not that simple; the problem seems like it can be analogous to some sort of knapsack and/or traveling salesman problem, which are NP-hard! Even testing would take a long time.
  - amluto 4y ago
    That’s true if you want an optimal solution. If you just want a decent solution (for various definitions of decent), the complexity may not be too bad.

amluto 4y ago

Of course I’m oversimplifying the process. But my point is the actual number of flights, passenger and luggage loads and unloads, etc can be a lot lower than a normal workload. On a normal day, an average Southwest plane flies quite a few hops, loads many passengers, unloads many passengers, etc. For a worst case reset, the normal routing doesn’t need to be followed. Of course this will introduce complexity. But it will also need decently less than a normal day’s number of operations. If I were designing a solver for where to move aircraft and crews (which is apparently what SkySolver does), I would test it on random and malicious inputs. If it’s initialized with every crew member and every plane at an independent random airport in the US (where Southwest has service) with a few broken for good measure and a few airports shut down, it should still find a solution. Waiting 12-24 hours to start so none of the crew is timed out could be part of a valid solution.

bfung 4y ago
It’s still probably not that simple; the problem seems like it can be analogous to some sort of knapsack and/or traveling salesman problem, which are NP-hard! Even testing would take a long time.
- amluto 4y ago
  That’s true if you want an optimal solution. If you just want a decent solution (for various definitions of decent), the complexity may not be too bad.