The project studies the day to day operation of the airline industry, including financing, scheduling and timetabling of flights, ticketing and reservations, maintenance and availability of aircraft, passenger and cargo services, air traffic control, etc. In phase 1 of the project, a thorough analysis of the domain of airline business was carried out, on the basis of which general requirements for software systems supporting the airline business were identified. Phase 2 concentrates on one specific component of airline business, namely flight effectiveness analysis, and the terms and concepts of this process are currently being defined and specified.
August 1995 to September 1996 (phase 1).
September 1997 to March 1998 (phase 2).
Vietnam Airlines
Many developing countries are experiencing a boom in air traffic, leading to a rapidly increasing demand for information technology support throughout the aviation industry. In order to be ultimately in a position to either develop or co-develop support software themselves, it is important not only that the airline companies should understand, both fully and precisely, the requirements across the whole range of activities within the airline business but also that they should have staff who are trained in the development or the procurement of software matching those requirements.
The project aims to document and formally specify the essential properties of a wide range of airline business activities and to design and prototype software supporting these activities.
The first phase of the project ran from August 1995 to September 1996. One fellow from Vietnam Airlines carried out a detailed high-level domain analysis of the whole of the airline business and investigated the requirements for an airline business "management" system which would not only support the management of the business but which would also allow the integration of diverse software already in use in different departments of an airline. Two documents describing the results of this domain analysis and requirements capture were produced, and some of this work was summarised and generalised in a UNU/IIST technical report ([1]) and presented at the 1996 Asia Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC'96), Seoul, Korea, in December 1996.
The second phase of the project, which involves two fellows from Vietnam airlines, focuses on one particular aspect of airline business, Flight Effectiveness Analysis, which is a process an airline performs in order to assess the success or otherwise of its flight operations. This phase began in September 1997 and is currently scheduled to run until March 1998. A detailed informal description of the essential elements of flight effectiveness analysis has been produced, and a formal description is currently in preparation.
It is hoped to continue the project to a third phase, possibly involving the development of a prototype software system supporting flight effectiveness analysis.