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The purpose of this paper is to identify perspective and feasible combinations of the existing revenue-driven methods with still more pervasive features of knowledge-based management and green management in hotel industry. The authors believe that the key path to success is in even closer, that is, daily personal orientation on customers, specifically on their satisfaction in both functional and emotional dimensions.

A research prototype of competitiveness modelling framework can be fully implemented in accordance with the methodology, proposed by Mitroff and Kilmann (1978). The key output of our conceptual modelling stage was causal loop diagram, showing relations among internal variables and determining overall dynamics of analyzed problem. In the implementation phase, the authors adopted system dynamics (SD) paradigm, which composes system behaviour from parametrically adjustable temporal accumulation of levels of internal resources. These resources (stocks) can be both quantitative (money, employees, services) and qualitative (trust, motivation, quality). After parameterization and validation, SD models are used for the analysis of real-world situations.

With the resultant interactive SD model, the authors designed and tested several scenarios, comparing the purely revenue-oriented hotel management with its customers-oriented and organizational knowledge-supported enhancement. The authors’ experiments showed that the proposed extension can contribute to the overall performance up to 15 per cent. According to the experimental findings, the primary reasons for the improvement are higher ratio of regularly returning customers and improved efficiency of internal processes as a result of continuous organizational learning.

So far, hotel managers use mainly simple analytic and planning tools, which cannot cover the practical complexity of surrounding market and internal processes. In comparison with purely revenue-based principles, advanced managerial practices, considering also qualitative and human-related matters, require additional viewpoints. The authors enhanced the hospitality domain with the introduction of dynamic hypotheses – feasible explanations of temporal behaviour of complex structures.

In the European project AFLoNext, active flow control (AFC) measures were adopted in the wing tip extension leading edge to suppress flow separation. It is expected that the designed wing tip extension may improve aerodynamic efficiency by about 2 per cent in terms of fuel consumption and emissions. As the leading edge of the wing tip is not protected with high-lift device, flow separation occurs earlier than over the inboard wing in the take-off/landing configuration. The aim of this study is the adoption of AFC to delay wing tip stall and to improve lift-to-drag ratio.

Several actuator locations and AFC strategies were tested with computational fluid dynamics. The first approach was “standard” one with physical modeling of the actuators, and the second one was focused on the volume forcing method. The actuators location and the forcing plane close to separation line of the reference configuration were chose to enhance the flow with steady and pulsed jet blowing. Dependence of the lift-to-drag benefit with respect to injected mass flow is investigated.

The mechanism of flow separation onset is identified as the interaction of slat-end and wing tip vortices. These vortices moving toward each other with increasing angle of attack (AoA) interact and cause the flow separation. AFC is applied to control the slat-end vortex and the inboard movement of the wing tip vortex to suppress their interaction. The separation onset has been postponed by about 2° of AoA; the value of ift-to-drag (L/D) was improved up to 22 per cent for the most beneficial cases.

The AFC using the steady or pulsed blowing (PB) was proved to be an effective tool for delaying the flow separation. Although better values of L/D have been reached using steady blowing, it is also shown that PB case with a duty cycle of 0.5 needs only one half of the mass flow.

Two approaches of different levels of complexity are studied and compared. The first is based on physical modeling of actuator cavities, while the second relies on volume forcing method which does not require detailed actuator modeling. Both approaches give consistent results.