1,720,961 research outputs found

    Tarmac Delay Policies: A Passenger-Centric Analysis

    Get PDF
    In this paper, we analyze the effectiveness of the 2010 Tarmac Delay Rule from a passenger - centric point of view. The Tarmac Delay Rule stipulates that aircraft lift-off, or an opportunity for passengers to deplane, must occur no later than three hours after the cabin door closure at the gate of the departure airport; and that an opportunity for passengers to deplane must occur no later than three hours after the touchdown at the arrival airport. The Tarmac Delay Rule aims to protect enplaned passengers on commercial aircraft from excessively long delays on the tarmac upon taxi-out or taxi-in, and monetarily penalizes airlines that violate the stipulated three-hour tarmac time limit. Comparing the actual flight schedule and delay data after the Tarmac Delay Rule was in effect with that before, we find that the Rule has been highly effective in reducing the frequency of occurrence of long tarmac times. However, another significant effect of the rule has been the rise in flight cancellation rates. Cancellations result in passengers requiring rebooking, and often lead to extensive delay in reaching their final destinations. Using an algorithm to estimate passenger delay, we quantify delays to passengers in 2007, before the Tarmac Delay Rule was enacted, and compare these delays to those estimated for hypothetical scenarios with the Tarmac Delay Rule in effect for that same year. Our delay estimates are calculated using U.S. Department of Transportation data from 2007. Through our results and several sensitivity analyses, we show that the overall impact of the current Tarmac Delay Rule is a significant increase in passenger delays, especially for passengers scheduled to travel on the flights which are at risk of long tarmac delays. We evaluate the impacts on passengers of a number of rule variations, including changes to the maximum time on the tarmac, and variations in that maximum by time-of-day. Through extensive scenario analyses, we conclude that a better balance between the conflicting objectives of reducing the frequency of long tarmac times and reducing total passenger delays can be achieved through a modified version of the existing rule. This modified version involves increasing the tarmac time limit to 3.5 hours and only applying the rule to flights with planned departure times before 5pm. Finally, in order to implement the Rule more effectively, we suggest the tarmac time limit to be defined in terms of the time when the aircraft begin returning to the gate instead of being defined in terms of the time when passengers are allowed to deplane.This research was supported by the Federal Aviation Administration National Center of Excellence for Aviation Operations Research (NEXTOR II)

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

    Get PDF
    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Airline scheduling and air traffic control : incorporating uncertainty and passenger and airline preferences

    No full text
    Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Operations Research Center, 2017.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 193-201).The global airline industry is a multi-stakeholder stochastic system whose performance is the outcome of complex interactions between its multiple decisions-makers under a high degree of uncertainty. Inadequate understanding of uncertainty and stakeholder preferences leads to adverse effects including airline losses, delays and disruptions. This thesis studies a set of topics in airline scheduling and air traffic control to mitigate some of these issues. The first part of the thesis focuses on building aircraft schedules that are robust against delays. We develop a robust optimization approach for building aircraft routes. The goal is to mitigate propagated delays, which are defined as the delays caused by the late arrival of aircraft from earlier flights and are the top cause of flight delays in the United States air transportation system. The key feature of our model is that it allows us to handle correlation in flight delays explicitly that existing approaches cannot handle efficiently. We propose an efficient decomposition algorithm to solve the robust model and present the results of numerical experiments, based on data from a major U.S. airline, to demonstrate its effectiveness compared to existing approaches. The second part of the thesis focuses on improving the planning of air traffic flow management (ATFM) programs by incorporating airline preferences into the decision-making process. We develop a voting mechanism to gather airline preferences of candidate ATFM designs. A unique feature of this mechanism is that the candidates are drawn from a domain with infinite cardinality described by polyhedral sets. We conduct a detailed case study based on actual schedule data at San Francisco International Airport to assess its benefits in planning of ground delay programs. Finally, we study an integrated airline network planning model which incorporates passenger choice behavior. We model passenger demand using a multinomial logit choice model and integrate it into a fleet assignment and schedule design model. To tackle the formidable computational challenge associated with solving this model, we develop a reformulation, decomposition and approximation scheme. Using data from a major U.S. airline, we prove that the proposed approach brings significant profit improvements over existing methods.by Chiwei Yan.Ph. D

    Variations on the Author

    Get PDF
    “Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship

    Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis

    Get PDF
    We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

    Get PDF
    We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more sophisticated methods

    Author Index

    No full text
    Nao informado

    koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist

    No full text
    We have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
    corecore