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Journal 'Transportation Science' marks 100th anniversary of flight with special issue

"The strong link between operations research and aviation makes it very natural and perhaps mandatory to commemorate the Wright brothers' first flight with a special issue of Transportation Science," writes Michael Ball of the Robert H. Smith School of Business and Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park. Prof. Ball is the anniversary issue's Guest Editor.

"In many respects, the Wright brothers' achievement can be viewed as a success for systems engineering," he writes. "More impressive than the aircraft itself may be the systems surrounding the provision of services based on it. These include the passenger and freight air transport networks; airline-reservation systems; passenger-, crew-, and fleet-scheduling systems; maintenance operations; package-sorting systems; baggage-handling systems; etc. Operations research has played a fundamental role in the development of these systems."

The journal includes a foreword by John-Paul Clarke of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT and Bernard Gendron of the Cntre de Recherche sur les Transports, Université de Montréal and an introduction by Prof. Ball. The studies appearing in the special issue are:

• "Applications of Operations Research in the Air Transport Industry" by Cynthia Barnhart, Peter Belobaba, and Amedea R. Odoni of MIT.

• "A Bundle Algorithm Approach for the Aircraft Schedule Recovery Problem During Hub Closures" by Benjami G. Thengvall, Jonathan F. Bard, and Gang Yu of the University of Texas, Austin.

• "Rerouting Aircraft for Airline Recovery" by Jay M. Rosenberger of American Airlines and Ellis L. Johnson and George L. Nemhauser of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

• "Optimization-Based Analysis of Collaborative Airport Arrival Planning" by Kari Andersson of CIGNA Health Care, William Hall of Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, and Stephen Atkins and Eric Feron of MIT.

• "An Airspace Planning and Collaborative Decision-Making Model: Part I-Probabilistic Conflicts, Workload, and Equity Considerations" by Hanif D. Sherali of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Raymond W. Staats of the Air Force Institute of Technology, and Antonio A. Trani, also of Virginia Tech.

• "Factors Influencing Blind Conflict Risk in En Route Sectors Under Free-Flight Conditions" by Thomas R. Willemain of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Transportation Science is a leading forum for a cross-disciplinary community of operations research scientists and engineers interested in advances in the basic theories and methodologies for the analysis, design, and operation of all modes of transportation for the movement of people and goods.

The Editor-in-Chief of Transportation Science is Hani Mahmassani, Charles Irish Sr. Chair in Civil and Environmental Engineering Director, Maryland Transportation Initiative, the University of Maryland College Park.

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.

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