"A patchwork quilt of local noise regulations plays hob with airline scheduling," said Mr. Crandall.

"The Americn people have the right to truth in airline scheduling," Transportation Secretary Elizabeth Hanford Dole said in announcing a new ruling.

An airline expert testified that airline scheduling was responsible for, at most, 11 percent of delays, with the biggest problem being en-route delays, often because of thunderstorms.

The methodologies have a long record of success in a wide variety of industries, such as airline scheduling, supply chain management, financial planning, military logistics and telecommunications routing.

The vagaries of airline scheduling prohibited Lauren from getting a flight into Albuquerque that night, and the first flight out of Salt Lake City the next morning was booked solid.

A generation ago, when airline scheduling was performed on big sheets of paper by men wearing green eye shades, that would have been an unusual combination of cities for a single plane in a single day.

"The American people have a right to truth in airline scheduling," Mrs. Dole said.

Full-scale baggage-matching could cause long delays and disrupt airline scheduling.

The companies have applied these technologies to applications such as drug discovery, black-box trading systems, bankruptcy forecasting, airline scheduling, reinsurance, and professional physician networks.

He has developed models and algorithms for several airline scheduling, railroad scheduling, and logistics problems.