Tomáš Řehák
Tutor. Fifteen years in airport ground operations, which is fifteen years of watching good queueing theory lose to the gate agent's discretion.
- Role
- Tutor
- Affiliation
- Slop University School of Invented Disciplines
- tomas.rehak@slop.university
- Contact
- Available in every lab, and by email. I answer within two working days; if it is about your census data and it is urgent, say so in the subject line.
I ran turnarounds. That means I was responsible for the interval between an aircraft arriving at a gate and the same aircraft leaving it, and for most of that interval the binding constraint was people walking down an aisle at different speeds while carrying bags of different sizes.
The literature on boarding is unusually good. There are strategies — you will meet several in week 10 — that are demonstrably twenty to thirty per cent faster than what most airlines do. Almost none of them are used. The reasons are interesting and almost entirely non-technical: they interfere with selling priority boarding, they separate families, they are hard to explain at a gate, and they fail badly when a handful of passengers ignore them. I think that gap between the best known algorithm and the deployed one is the most useful thing an operations person can show a student, and it is why I teach here.
I take the labs, which means I am the person who will read your raw counts and ask why you stopped the stopwatch when you did. I am pedantic about measurement and unapologetic about it: nearly every wrong conclusion in this field starts with a number somebody collected carelessly and then trusted.