Airlines look to cut time spent on the tarmac

LefterShark@lemmy.blahaj.zone to World News@lemmy.world – 97 points – Airlines turn to AI to allocate gates and cut waiting times
bbc.com
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Another problem that has been solved years ago with regular old algorithms and properly designed airports.

AI not gonna solve crap when your entire timetable collapses because one flight got delayed and you refused to spend money to use additional gates or upgrade an antiquated 90s system.

Please read the article. They are talking about an improvement over existing algorithms by using quantum computing.

Yeah, and it's also scalable because it uses the blockchain, you know, on the cloud, via 5g.

Jesus christ almighty.

But not at the expense of safety, right?

Right?

Right:

The system uses machine learning to assign arriving aircraft to the nearest available gate with the shortest taxi time.

Sooooooooo standard tree search that comp science students were doing in the 80s?

I'd imagine it would be more like CPU scheduling than tree traversal, but according to the article they just do it by hand now.

Though they'll still use the fucking ridiculous boarding groups that slow down embarking just to make rich people feel special, right?

I know "rich" means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but "paying for priority boarding" should not be included in a reasonable definition of the word.

It absolutely should be - it gives you no reasonable value... you don't get there any faster - and having priority boarding (outside of for those with kids/disabilities) makes everything slower for everyone. It is absolutely the most frivolous luxury.

100% even if I get like a or b group I still don't board til the end. Does me no good getting on the plane before everyone if I have an assigned seat. I usually have just a backpack with me and don't need to waste my time with the stupid overhead bin. Southwest was the only airline where boarding made sense and now they're fucking that up too.

It's a frivolous luxury that costs like $20 extra per ticket. For most people that's just personal preference.

For twenty bucks you might be moving yourself from group 7 to group 5 - it costs hundreds or thousands to reach group 1.

Do you mean flying first class? Because that's different than priority boarding. They are in a different section of the plane, and the people there are paying for a lot more things than boarding.

Yea, that's my point - you're paying 20 bucks to be the most special of the pleblians... you're not even shifting significantly in the boarding process - you're just paying money to be the person who stood up near the gate first.

And the fact that some people are willing to pay is why we have eight boarding groups now.

Okay but it's 20 bucks. The person paying it is probably a relatively regular person attempting to feel special. A rich person is just buying a first class ticket without a second thought, and then arriving at the last possible second to board after chilling at the airport lounge. A really rich person isn't flying commercial.

AI doing air traffic control work?

Jesus fucking Christ, what could possibly go wrong?

LLMs and generative AI aren't going to be any good on this problem. The article is using the older, non-buzzword computer science meaning, which includes algorithms for this exact problem, such as the ones used for a category of difficult problems known as constraint satisfaction problems. These problems were artificial intelligence problems before the term "AI" was turned into a marketing buzzword.

Allocating gates is one problem that traditional computers and algorithms struggle to do quickly, with calculation times increasing disproportionately to the size of the problem.

But, Dr Doetsch is confident that approaches using quantum computing will crush the problem.

"Quantum algorithms will allow optimally assigning gates, and other resources, even in large airports and travel networks. These algorithms will be able to respond to changing external factors with updated optimal solutions in real time," he says.

This stuff is cool, and has nothing to do with generative AI.

Why do you think this is going to replace air traffic control work? It's picking which gate to park the plane at. This was done by airline and airport operations teams, not ATC. Imagine if you could automatically pick gates to reduce the time a plane spends taxiing and/or minimize time passengers spend walking. That's 100% a useful application for computer optimization algorithms. Humans aren't going to do that better and it's not a function of safety that tower or ground control needs to do.

all that's fine and good, but one just needs to see your username to fathom what could potentially go wrong.

Computer algorithms solve problems all over the world for companies already. I bet airlines already have teams of people using computer algorithms to figure crew management, flight routing, cost optimization, etc.

The fact that they're exploring quantum computers and non-classical algorithms just suggests that gate allocation is NP-Hard. Sure things go wrong when computers fail already, Look at Southwest or Delta's recent meltdown, but to act like this a bad thing is just nonsense. This should be looked at as a good thing that airlines are working on.

I feel like ATC is one of those pattern-recognition constraint-satisfaction problem jobs where a (non-generative!) algorithm can probably do a pretty good job.

Everything they are doing has known algorithms. Some are np problems though, but ai isn't any better for those than the existing algorithyms. but ai is hype today so everyone needs to do it. In a few years this will die off and ai will be used for where it is useful. Just like every other ai that has been a fad for a while since 1950.