"The economic blow that the airlines suffered makes the contributions of operations researchers more important than ever," explained Thomas M. Cook, the new President Elect of INFORMS. Dr. Cook is a former executive of American Airlines and Sabre. He is currently CEO of Dallas-based Replane Inc., a company that formed last May.
Airlines employ revenue management to vary ticket price based on a plane's occupancy and the length of time before departure that a passenger books a flight. The operations research -based system allows airlines to increase revenue by optimizing the revenue mix on each flight.
"Because the airlines are fighting for survival, any incremental revenue or cost savings they can effect is important," says Dr. Cook. "In addition to revenue management, airlines use operation research-based systems to design their networks and optimize their daily operations. That was important before. It's even more important now."
Operations researchers' improvement of airline profitability goes back to the era of airline deregulation. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Dr. Cook and his team of operations researchers at American Airlines created revenue management and a wide variety of other model-based systems that have been implemented at American and many other major airlines. Since then, these systems have contributed billions of dollars to the airlines.
The annual convention of the Institute for Operations Research and theManagement Sciences (INFORMS®) takes place in Miami Beach from Sunday, November 4 to Wednesday, November 7 at the Fontainebleau Hilton Resort. Operations researchers are little known but indispensable experts who use math and science to improve decision-making, management, and operations in a host of fields.
The convention includes sessions on topics applied to numerous fields, including air safety, the military, e-commerce, information technology, energy, transportation, marketing, telecommunications, and health care. More than 1,800 papers are scheduled to be delivered. Additional information about the conference is at http://www2.informs.org/Conf/Miami2001 and http://www2.informs.org/Press.
The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®) is an international scientific society with 10,000 members, including Nobel Prize laureates, dedicated to applying scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management, and operations. Members of INFORMS work in business, government, and academia. They are represented in fields as diverse as airlines, health care, law enforcement, the military, the stock market, and telecommunications. The INFORMS website is at http://www.informs.org.