{"id":86,"date":"2006-07-10T15:33:21","date_gmt":"2006-07-10T19:33:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=72"},"modified":"2006-07-10T15:33:21","modified_gmt":"2006-07-10T19:33:21","slug":"poker-and-airline-scheduling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2006\/07\/10\/poker-and-airline-scheduling\/","title":{"rendered":"Poker and Airline Scheduling"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a nice post<\/a> on the Math and Poker blog<\/a> on the importance of identifying key variables and the flexibility that is available for many decisions in a process. The example begins with a standard critical-path type scheduling example, making the point that jobs not on the critical path have some flexibility. This point is extremely well known, of course, but it is interesting to think about what to do with this flexibilty. In poker, the author of the blog (I can’t see who it is), notes that there are a lot of situations where the difference between the best and next best decision is not a lot, but can be used to set up the opponents in particular ways (EV in the following is Expected Value):<\/p>\n

The way that most people think about EV in poker is like treating each of these tasks independently. If I bet this hand what happens? Things like folding when the pot is small even if calling is +EV for this hand are ignored even though doing so might set up other players, or that player, to make a big bluff on some other hand.<\/p>\n

If you really want to optimize your stratagy and maximize your win, they you just have to look at the game in a global sense. A strategic Expected Value of a collection of actions is what you need to consider, not a tactical Expected Value of one action.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So what does this have to do with airline scheduling? A lot of work is being done right now to combat the fragility of airline schedules. David Ryan<\/a> of the University of Auckland gave a talk last week at the EURO conference<\/a> on his work with New Zealand Air (my plans are to visit David for most of next year, so I was particularly interested in his work). In this work, David had a measure of fragility of a schedule (generally due to crews changing planes with a short layover: one late plane could quickly affect many others). David showed that there were near-optimal solutions (based on the main objective of minimizing cost) that had much better properties with regards to fragility. Things got even better if the schedule could be modified slightly.
\nThe problem with both the poker example and crew scheduling is that the objective is much “fuzzier” than the underlying main objective. And that makes it much harder to “optimize”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a nice post on the Math and Poker blog on the importance of identifying key variables and the flexibility that is available for many decisions in a process. The example begins with a standard critical-path type scheduling example, making the point that jobs not on the critical path have some flexibility. This point … Continue reading “Poker and Airline Scheduling”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs-and-web","category-research"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}