Greg Barton and Mark Sturdivant’s talk is about a rule based system that Southwest Airlines developed mainly for Dispatchers, Supervisors and Operations staff.

The system is all about to track an Aircraft, where it is going, what are they doing, etc. What happened in the past, what is happening now and what will happen in the future. They also want to track Stations (Airports) such as capacity, gate capacity and staffing capacity.

All of that information is to try and anticipate any problems that might occur in the near future in near real time while things are changing constantly (situational awareness).

The inputs for the system are:

• Aircraft positions at their originating stations
• Schedules
• etc.

A fleet of 500 aircraft can generate about 70000 change events per day caused by delays, changes of routes, weather, maintenance, etc.

They overcame multiple challenges in designing the system so that it would support their needs. One of the more difficult ones was to support a system failure and then coming back online and dealing with the time elapsed and the events that occurred during the downtime.

The system is there to giver alerts to the ground operations groups and allows them to take decisions to react to these warnings. The system does not currently suggest any course of action (yet).

Very interesting application of rules to help address a simple problem that gets complex because of the amount of information and changes in variables that happen in a day.