Thirty years of airline operations research

Operations research has been with the airlines for some 30 years. Since 1961, the Airline Group of the International Federation of Operational Research OR Societies (AGIFORS) has worked for the advancement of Operational Research OR in the field of air transportation by arranging meetings and exchanging information. A survey of the papers presented at the AGIFORS Annual Conferences between 1961 and 1985 reveals certain systematic shifts over the years in the relative frequencies among the principal Operational Research OR subjects such as fleet and schedule planning, personnel management, maintenance and inventory, space and yield control, and operations planning. In most cases, these trends are open to rational explanations.