Saturday, January 19, 2008

On events in flight management

I have arrived home today from my Europe business trip - 11 hours later than planned. The crash in Heathrow airport had created a mess in the airport, only one runway operated, and my flight was delayed -
and I missed the connection in Zurich, and had to take the next flight to Israel - 11 hours later.
In the last year it seems to me that more events related to flights happened relative to previous years. One of the issues in event processing is - how should we react to occurance of event. In some cases the detection of the business situation is quite complicated, and we have been discussion "complex event processing" and such, however, in other cases, the detection is very easy, the complexity is in the response. Earlier this week, when I have arrived to Heathrow airport the following event occured:

The flight arrived 20 minutess eariler;

  • The slot near the gate was still occupied.

The reaction has been - send the airplane to park outside the terminal and transfer the passengers to the terminal with buse. Soundes reasonable --- yes.

However -- it seems that nobody verified that there are buses available. The end result - we sat in the airplane 45 minutes, until the buses arrived. The captain told us several times that he is pushing them to send buses, but they are not responsive....

Back to last night --- I must say that I have been in this situation before, and that Swiss airline has handled it well - took the responsibility, gave us vouchers for hotels, breaksfat, and transportation from and to the airport. I have been in a somewhat similar situation last summer, when I had to fly Delta, and missed the connection in Atlanta, Delta's agents were very unpleasent, notified us that the vouchers for hotels we got at the source of the flights are all void, and that we are on our own. After 15 attempts I found a place in Motel Six, and got there by cab. Since I already had complains about Delta before - I have notified my travel agent to scratch Delta from the lit

The Swiss attitude in much better in ny eyes - but it seems that now I'll add another rule -- try to avoid connections at the last segment of the trip (going home !). I could re-arrnage my trip to do so. This is an intelligent event processing - mitigating predicted event.

Returning to normal writing of the Blog on more techncial issues - soon.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

See http://complexevents.com/?p=282