- I would actually claim that some of the more dramatic and valuable advancements in pairing optimization have come in recent years - as a result of long-term research efforts. Performance improvements, through parallelisation and usage of multi-core architectures, have opened up for new ways of using crew pairing for more advanced analytics and long term planning. One example is on-the-fly re-timing of the flight schedule, with small adjustments of some 5-15 minutes while preserving aircraft feasibility, for ironing out the 'wrinkles' in the flight schedule which creates those golden opportunities for crew connections that otherwise would be untapped potential. Doing that, during the normal optimization of everything else, was an amazing step forward, and can deliver some 1-3% additional crew efficiency. And add to this the bio-mathematical fatigue models and robustness models to be taken into account, also simultaneously - and you understand why I get excited.
What trends have you observed in the customer base regarding their needs and usage more recently?
- I think more and more operators are going beyond the obvious use-case for our pairing solution, the production planning. We now see operators increasingly using our solutions for long-term planning as well as for decision support in what I refer to as planning analytics. Planning analytics is about supporting the strategic decisions regarding the flight schedule, overall crew establishment and structure, even the rules used for planning. This is not only about checking the consequences of ideas by quantifying them on real data with real production systems, which of course is very valuable in itself, but is about generating the ideas for improvement using the solution capabilities to quickly re-model, re-configure, optimize and quantify - more proactively. This is extremely valuable work which we would like to support in an even better way going forward. Rave, our modelling language, plays a key part here, in tandem with the optimization technology.
What tricks do you have up your sleeve for the coming years?
- I need to be careful here and not reveal too much, but I can safely say we are putting efforts into improved teaming of crew - addressing even better crew well-being and operational robustness. We are also investigating how to best use more detailed external sources of information in the optimization, such as online ticket prices for positioning flights. Other parts include tighter integration with surrounding processes for flight scheduling, aircraft routing and rostering, and of course supporting the analytics work I talked about earlier. For the existing customer base, these are all things that will be discussed at CDP in Gothenburg in May.
Please find more information about the Jeppesen Crew Pairing solution here, including a contact form. For studying-up more on RAVE and the value of good decision support, please take a look at this PDF.
Mattias works from the Jeppesen Gothenburg office in western Sweden. In his spare time he engages a lot in skiing and sailing, but what you really should watch out for is challenging him in a game of squash.
