Imagine that a snowstorm is coming and your flight to New York is scheduled to take off in 40 minutes. Will it be delayed or flat out cancelled?
If you’ve encountered this aggravation, you’ll be happy to learn that a team of students from Concordia’s Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering feels your pain. To help solve the problem, they created an algorithm to reduce flight cancellations by 60 per cent in a simulation of storm conditions.
It was their prize-winning Capstone engineering design project — the final assignment that all undergraduates studying in Concordia’s Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science must complete in order to graduate.
“As a reference point, we used data from the Montréal-Trudeau Airport during a snowstorm in December of 2012,” says Shereen Ali, BEng 15, one of the six students who worked on the Capstone project, The Contingency Advisory Program. “We had to learn the airport lingo, then take into account the weather, priority flights, airport protocols, IATA regulations, Nav Canada requirements and learn how flights are assigned to different gates.”
Gate allocation, it turns out, is an important variable during a storm. “We ended up speaking to snow-removal teams and operations people to determine which gates function best in bad weather, then we had to figure out the best way to automate gate assignment for full efficiency, taking into account all the restrictions,” says Qasim Rehman, BEng 15, a team member.
Rehman and Ali, along with fellow members Dana Fruchter, Anita Sarkissian, Alexa Ramia and Chyntia Sari, set about collecting data. Three of the team members took a graduate-level math class with their Capstone supervisor, assistant professor Ivan Contreras, to learn how to create an algorithm to process the weather and airport data.