Tag: Heathrow

OM in the News: How the McLaren Racing Team Sped Up Heathrow Airport

mclarenThe McLaren Formula 1 Racing Team has long had a reputation as a data-obsessed racing operation, writes BusinessWeek (Oct. 6-12, 2014). So the company decided 5 years ago that the highly specialized expertise it’s developed in data analysis, simulation, and decision support is something that businesses would profit from and pay for. Among its projects, McLaren’s Applied Technology Group has designed health monitoring systems for sick children, helped data center operators to better manage spikes in demand, and created a scheduling system for Heathrow Airport that reduces flight delays.

Air travel, like racing, is a realm where things often don’t quite go right. The limited supply of Heathrow airport gate slots and runway space and the inevitability of poor weather combine to create a tightly coupled network where delays and bottlenecks can quickly ripple across continents. The managers at airports who coordinate arrivals and departures have to deal with planes that took off the day before—some already late or rerouted—and to figure out how best to bring them in. Heathrow presents a particularly intricate puzzle. It moves more people than all but a couple of airports in the world, yet it has only 2 runways—Chicago’s O’Hare, by comparison, has 8. And local environmental and noise regulations restrict flights to between 6 a.m. and 11 p.m.

Prior to McLaren, scheduling had relied on a computer program that looked at a few “study days” from the past season, usually idealized days in which little went wrong. McLaren created a software tool that models bad days as well as good ones and simulates the effects on global air traffic of events such as a blizzard in Frankfurt or fog in Singapore. That’s enabled the airport to better plan for delays and, as a result, to increase its capacity.  For example, if it becomes clear by midafternoon that Heathrow simply won’t be able to handle all of its remaining scheduled arrivals before the 11 p.m. cutoff, the software will recommend how to proceed based on Heathrow’s priorities. Cancel the fewest flights? Preserve the most connections? Favor long-haul flights over shorter ones?

Classroom discussion questions:

1. To what other elements of airport operations can simulation be applied?

2. Why is simulation important to McLaren?

OM in the News: Queuing Up at Heathrow

The great unknown for international travel: How long will I have to wait at immigration when I arrive? At Bangkok’s airport, it can be 2 hours. At New York’s JFK,  its 23 minutes at 3 am, but 37 minutes at 5 am.  And at London’s Heathrow,  25% of non-EEU passengers wait more than 45 minutes. (Heathrow’s target that 95% of passengers  clear with 45 minutes was breached at least 107 times during the 1st 2 weeks in April).

The Wall Street Journal (May 5-6, 2012) reports that the biggest cause of long delays is that arriving flights aren’t spaced out evenly, and that there aren’t always enough border agents to process long lines when arrivals are clumped together. “It’s simply a matter of a saturated queue, and you solve that with either more servers or shorter processing time,” says Carnegie Mellon’s Prof. Alfred Blumstein.

Since shorter processing times could mean less attention paid to security checks to keep illegal migrants or terrorists from crossing borders, airports need to add more agents to minimize wait times. Part of the challenge with staffing, of course, is that demand for passport checks varies widely throughout the day.  “We know at times queues have been too long,” says a Heathrow spokesman. He said the agency is adding 80 agents at peak times, and 480 during this summer’s Olympics.

With budgets tight, however, expanding the workforce can be difficult. Prof. Blumstein, for example, who waited for over an hour at Heathrow two weeks ago, suggested moving people sooner from the main queue into shorter lines before each desk to “shorten the dead time.” As we teach in Module D, however, if the person already at the desk takes longer than average to clear, this can increase the overall average time in queue. That can lead to frustration if others who were further behind in the queue get served first.

Discussion questions:

1. Identify which queuing model Heathrow uses now.

2. How can you improve on Blumstein’s suggestion?