2025 Franz Edelman Award finalist: Luftansa

Welcome to the latest in our special series of Resoundingly Human podcasts highlighting the finalist teams for the 2025 Franz Edelman Award, the Nobel Prize of Analytics, which will be awarded at the upcoming 2025 INFORMS Analytics+ Conference in Indianapolis this April.

These finalist projects represent teams from around the world who have leveraged advanced analytics to transform their organizations, address their most significant challenges, and better serve their customers and communities. Today I’m joined by members of the team representing Lufthansa to discuss their finalist project in the lead-up to the Franz Edelman competition.

One of the subject matter experts, one of the operations controllers, had written a tiny example that was, I think four aircraft and about six flights. They’d assigned the aircraft to those flights and computed what the costs should be and we were just making sure we got the same numbers out, making sure we were accounting for things the same way, that we’d implemented the maths the way they were expecting. We turned this into the format we needed for the solver, we ran it through, and we got a different result. We were searching for a bug for I think the best part of a day before we realized that actually the solver had found a correct but better solution. So even with just six flights this is a hard enough problem that humans struggle to compete with operations research techniques.

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