Using Specialized Agents in a Distributed MAS to Solve Airline Operations Problems: A Case Study

An airline schedule very rarely operates as planned. Problems related with aircrafts, crew members and passengers are common and the actions towards the solution of these problems are usually known as operations recovery. The airline operations control center (AOCC) tries to solve these problems with the minimum cost and satisfying all the required rules. In this paper we present the implementation of a distributed multi-agent system (MAS) representing the existing roles in an AOCC. This MAS has several specialized software agents that implement different algorithms, competing to find the best solution for each problem. We present a real case study where a crew recovery problem is solved. We show that it is possible to find valid solutions, in less time and with a smaller cost.