Best presentation at the conference…

…(at least among the ones I’ve seen) is by Dr. Tim Niznik of American Airlines who gave an outstanding talk on hub disruption management. He had the last time slot on Tuesday, which is always a difficult time slot since so many people are leaving to catch an evening flight, but his talk was extremely well attended. His presentation was very engaging with a mix of visuals about weather maps and tools such as the diversion tracker and the gate demand chart. The goal is to figure out how to strategically delay some flights in order to minimize excess gate demand, minimize operations beyond airport closure time, minimize system-wide passenger impact and minimize delay introduced without violating crew/curfew rules. This talk was so good I hope Dr. Niznik can be one of the plenary or semi-plenary speakers at an INFORMS conference very soon. The high quality of his team’s work deserves the visibility and dissemination to as large an audience as possible (and I don’t even fly American). If you’re a conference attendee, you can see his slides by logging into INFORMS Connect, clicking on My Communities and entering the Analytics 2016 community and browsing through the latest shared slides on the bottom left – he was part of the Tuesday Decision and Risk Analysis track.

The Analytics16 conference was one of the very best conferences I attended in recent memory and I’d like to thank Elea Feit for doing such an amazing job chairing the organizing committee (I know because I was part of the committee), as well as all my colleagues who helped put together such a remarkable event. The bar is set high for next year. The conference will be held in Las Vegas, NV, April 2-4, 2017. Mark your calendars!