Narrow Results

Frequent flyers have been shown to have a significant impact on airline long-term profitability, so it is becoming increasingly crucial to understand their needs. Objective of this paper is to forecast the next flight of frequent flyers, which will not only improve the customer experience but also assist airlines optimize their ticketing service platforms. In the data preparation phase, we use methods including data transformation and genetic algorithms (GA) to directly extract statistical features or excavate new predictors, which is inspired by the characteristics of the frequent flyers of Beijing Daxing International Airport (PKX). We synthesize ensemble models, linear regression models, evolutionary computation models, and fusion models for prediction. The hyperparameters can be optimized by the Tree-structured Parzen Estimator (TPE). After extensive comparison, the model developed with the average fusion strategy obtains the best prediction on the test set with a minimal MSLE of 0.7893.

An ophthalmic hospital with wings.

Knowledge management (KM) attracts more and more attention nowadays in either research or practice. Organisations often spend a lot of time and money to launch strategic KM initiatives without first assessing whether or not their culture is ready for the implementation of such initiatives. If the culture is not ready for implementing the initiatives, the effort put will rarely produce significant long-term benefits. Instead, employees will perceive them as a waste of time, and participate less actively in the KM initiatives. In this paper, a KM culture assessment tool (KMCAT) is purposely developed for assessing the organisational culture so as to ensure the success of implementation of KM initiatives. The KMCAT takes into account coherence, control, alliance and partnership, information and communication technology as well as innovation, which help an organisation to reveal culture profiles and hence provide directions for managing the culture. A case study of applying the KMCAT is undertaken in an aviation company and encouraging results are obtained.

A strategic capability of contemporary naval ships is the ability to launch and recover embarked aircraft such as helicopters in a maritime environment. Such operations are enormously challenging due to deck motion, limited landing space, visibility, ship’s superstructure, etc. This places extreme pressure on the pilot, ship’s crew and the platforms alike, making such shipboard operations the most dangerous of all helicopter flight missions. Therefore, the design and integration of equipment, systems and aids to ensure such operations are done as safely as is practicably possible presents ship builders, aircraft manufacturers, engineers and pilots with some extremely demanding and complex problems. Major naval ship design/build programmes that include an aviation capability will inevitably need to engage resources across multiple disciplines that include, but not limited to, engineering, design, logistics, administration, procurement, legal, alliance partners and the customer to manage project risks from the outset. This research highlights the need for a holistic/Systems Engineering approach that recognises risks across the wider ship programme, which can only be managed/resolved by cross-discipline collaboration. This paper presents a novel methodology to elicit risks qualitatively and models the relative risk profile of an aviation project throughout the ship programme life cycle. The use of an enterprise model based on the three “P” element methodology (3PE), product, process, people within an environment, has been developed. Furthermore, the research outlines a continuous management and visualisation approach that enables a process of dynamic analysis to both reduce and mitigate residual risks progressively throughout the project lifecycle to acceptable levels.

After intensifying in the 1980s and 1990s, the longstanding dispute between Europe and the United States over government subsidies for the commercial jetliner industry again heated up in 2004. This time, however, the stakes were higher because both nations sued each other at the World Trade Organization over government subsidies paid to their respective commercial jetliner companies. The dispute over subsidies has heightened trade tensions between the United States and Europe, as both companies spar for dominance in the highly competitive industry of commercial aircraft.

This paper provides a sequel to “Boeing-Airbus Subsidy Dispute: An Economic and Trade Perspective,” a paper written by these authors and published in the October-December 2001 issue of Global Economy Quarterly. The initial paper analyzed the trade frictions between Boeing and Airbus regarding governmental subsidies and its implications for the conduct and performance of the two companies in the commercial aircraft industry. This paper extends the analysis by discussing recent developments in the commercial aircraft industry, the subsidy dispute of Boeing and Airbus at the World Trade Organization, and the future health of the commercial jetliner industry.