Southwest Airlines Crew Scheduling Solver Degenerates Flight Network

December 21, 2022

Southwest Airlines encountered an unexpected crisis when its crew scheduling software repeatedly malfunctioned in response to weather-induced flight cancellations, stranding passengers for extended periods across the airline's network.

The incident underscores the importance of trustworthy AI governance and safe and secure AI practices. For those interested in shaping such guardrails, consider joining Project Cerebellum to contribute towards improving the HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Measure) for better harm prevention.
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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.678, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 3.2 — similarity 0.645, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MANAGE 4.1 — similarity 0.645, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: southwest-airlines
Alleged developer: general-electric
Alleged harmed parties: airline-passengers

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/432

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.