On airport events

Tomorrow I am planned to visit three airports,  starting from Ben-Gurion airport near Tel-Aviv to takeoff from Israel, moving through Frankfurt airport in Germany for connection (hopefully no serious delays, it seems to be snowing in Frankfurt),  and ending in the Dulles airport near Washington DC.   I have reported in this Blog in the past on several flights related events, most recently - getting back from DEBS 2012 in Berlin 49 hours later than planned.   Airports are full of events,  and it was interesting to read Pedro Garcia blogging about  event processing as part of airport management system.    In an airport there are many events related to flights, luggage, strikes, weather and more.    The events that Pedro relates are both event that happened and predicted events (flight delay can be predicted).    While some of the delays are force major, others are certainly created by people (I have plenty of stories about human inflicted events).   Improvement of flight management, as well as improvement of luggage handling systems, can be very helpful.

It is also interesting to note that the system is based on the architecture we presented in the EPIA book, which is explicitly mentioned.  Always good to see that our work is useful to somebody :-). 

Hoping for uneventful flights (have several more flights during the coming week). 

Black swan event?: Fuel pollution in Ben-Gurion Airport

Israel is a one-airport country  (there are several small ones for internal flights, but with the exception of some charter flights, all international flights go through Ben-Gurion Airport, near Tel-Aviv, given this fact, anytime that this airport does not function (e.g.due to strike) it becomes a major news item.  Today all aircrafts were grounded due to the fact that the fuel that were inserted to the aircrafts was polluted, due to a pollution that has been discovered in the fuel facility in the airport, many flights were cancelled, and other delayed were filled with a small amount of fuel that will enable them to fly to one of the nearest airport (mostly in Cyprus, some in Jordan) and refuel, the picture above taken from the YNET news site show passengers that are stranded in the airport,     Is such event a black swan event ?   seems so, but surprisingly this is the second instance of this event, such event happened before at the same airport a few years ago, and took a day to recover.     


From event processing point of view the interesting questions about such events are:

• Can black swan events be predicted?  first time that they happen?  second time that they happen? - this actually similar to the question - can we instantiate Merphy's laws -- infer everything that can go wrong? 
• How can rules and actions about  treating black swan events can be set, if we cannot even imagine the event's nature? 

The earthquake in Japan made thinking about black swan events more popular,  the challenge is to advance the thinking in that area.