# Disruption Management in Airport Operations Disruptions are the norm, not the exception. Weather, technical failures, crew shortages, late inbound aircraft, security incidents. An airport plan that was optimal at 6am is partially invalid by 9am and mostly useless by noon. The question is how fast you can replan. Three response modes, each with different computational requirements: **Reactive recovery:** Something breaks. You fix it. Manually reassign stands, reroute vehicles, notify stakeholders. Most airports operate here. It works, but the cascade effects are brutal. One late aircraft triggers gate conflicts that propagate across the terminal. **Proactive replanning:** You see the disruption forming (weather forecast, late inbound from origin airport) and replan before it hits. Requires good predictive data and fast optimization. [[Airport Collaborative Decision Making]] provides the data sharing backbone. The optimization layer needs to run in minutes, not hours. **Predictive anticipation:** You don't wait for the disruption signal. You model the probability distribution of disruption scenarios and pre-position resources for the most likely outcomes. This requires [[Digital Twins]] and [[Surrogate Models]] fast enough for real-time scenario evaluation. The key insight: disruption management is fundamentally an [[Online Algorithms]] problem. You're making decisions with incomplete information about the future. The optimal offline solution (computed with perfect foresight) is unachievable. The competitive ratio between your online decisions and the optimal offline solution is the real performance metric, not absolute delay minutes. Most disruption management today uses manual experience and simple heuristics. The research frontier is in rolling-horizon replanning: continuously re-optimizing over a sliding time window as new information arrives, using the best available predictions for the unknown future. Related: [[Aircraft Turnaround]], [[Stand and Gate Allocation]], [[Airport Operations MOC]], [[Online Algorithms]], [[Non-Stationarity of Objectives]], [[Anti fragility]] --- Tags: #deeptech #firstprinciple