WITNESS is employed across the breadth of British Airways

O.R. works with clients in all parts of the company and has employed WITNESS in a number of areas...

• Cargo
• Customer Services
• Manpower Strategy
• Terminal
• Flights & Crew
• Marketing
• Sales
• Schedule Delivery
• Terminal Operations (Passenger Flows & Stand Utilisation)

To review the areas where simulation has been used we resume some problems with its objective/complexities and the outcome of the WITNESS models developed.

Standby Cabin Crew model

 

Problem:	Standby crew required to cover flights should crew go sick, etc. Trade-off between the costs of having standby crew and the chance of flights being cancelled due to insufficient crew.
Objective:	To minimise wastage from never using standby crew, while ensuring all flights leave with a full complement of crew
Complexities:	3 Types of crew (Cabin Service Director, Purser, maincrew). Different notice periods, between 45mins and 24hrs. How to return sick people to duty after recovery.
Notes:	Model construction process helped clients understand the dynamics of the standby crew problem. Excel spreadsheet allowed non-WITNESS analysts to explore different standby rostering scenarios. Presented the model as a black box Ease of output interpretation CSV format allowed Excel macros to manipulate data
Outcome:	Would have been used in T.U. discussions (pre Sept. 11th).

Ascentis West End model

 

Problem:	Delivery times of freight between the store and the doors was poor. Hence, engagement times of customer´s trucks collecting or dropping off freight was outside target service standards. How could we improve the situation?
Objective:	Prioritise the work planned in order to minimise engagement times, while not damaging other service standards (80:20 approach)
Complexities:	Landside, Airside, Ground Floor Workstation flows all interact Use of temporary buffering
Outcome:	The visual aspects of the model helped the clients buy-in to the validity of the results Careful explanation and interpretation of the model outputs added power to our recommendations The clients took our recommendations and graphical reports into discussions with the contractors The improvements to the building successfully reduced engagement times

Potential future WITNESS modelling

• Engineering: Workshops
• Engineering: Stock control
• Marketing: Lounge modelling
• Cargo: Flow model of Ascentis
• Network Planning: Spill modelling
• Properties: Car Parking, Building usage
• Airport Planning: Airplane Boarding model
• Manpower Planning: Crew Vs Service levels onboard
• etc.