"Vikrant Vaze, an assistant professor of engineering at Dartmouth College, thinks... scheduling airline flights... is actually quite hard," reports the Concord Monitor.

"'It’s a very challenging problem. It’s the most difficult of the strategic problems that the airlines face,' he said.

"Vaze should know. Along with operations research analyst Keji Wei at Dartmouth’s engineering school and MIT professor Alexandre Jacquillat, he has been applying mathematics and computer algorithms to find a better way for airlines to do this.

"Spoiler alert: They haven’t found it yet, but they think they’re getting there. Their study, using 2016 data from Alaska Airlines, was published in Transportation Science, a leading journal in the field of transportation analysis, suggests that their approach could help. 'Some of the most critical decision-making steps taken by airlines across the world rely on tools that do not fully incorporate passengers’ preferences and the dynamics of flight scheduling, resulting in missed profits and unsatisfied passengers,' they say."