Dr. Abdelghany is an assistant professor of Environmental and Civil Engineering at Southern Methodist University. Khaled got his Ph.D. from the University of Texas Austin. Prior to Joining SMU, he worked as part of the research and development group at United Airlines. His work at United Airlines concentrates on the development of decision support tools for the airport/airlines management during irregular operations. His research in the area of airport/airlines management has been published in several international journals. He has also contributed to the area of urban transportation planning and advanced traffic management systems with concentration on intermodal network modeling.

Service reliability and on-time performance of airlines schedule is key factor in maintaining satisfaction of current customers and attracting new ones. This requires clever management of the different airlines resources to limit flight delays/cancellations during irregular operations. We present a decision support tool which automates airlines schedule recovery during irregular operations. We implement a greedy simulation-optimization approach in a rolling framework. The approach integrates a flight simulation model and a resource assignment optimization model. The flight simulation model predicts the list of disrupted flights in the system as function of resources availability and legality. The optimization model combines different actions in one efficient plan to recover the projected list of disrupted flights. An example that illustrates the application of the tool on a hypothetical airlines network is also presented.

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