The creation of legal crew schedules and organising their transport and lodging relies heavily on IT applications. Bernie Baldwin discusses the challenge with two major providers.
‘The right place at the right time’ is a phrase that can be applied to almost any walk of life. In the airline industry, it can be applied to a wide variety of topics, one of which is having flight crew just where they need to be at the right moment.
That means fixing rosters which ensure that everyone has the correct licences and duty time, as well as ensuring that, when overnighting, they have accommodation and transport to get them to and from the airport in a timely fashion. Key to this task are IT applications for the rostering and the transportation logistics.
Creating crew schedules
The first task is to create the schedules for the crew. Bernhard Brugger, senior product manager NetLine/Crew at Lufthansa Systems outlines how his company’s applications develop rosters including the order in which key elements such as seniority, flight time limitations and preferential bidding are taken into account.
“The planning process in crew management starts with long-term planning of capacity, absences and training. The long-term planning process is followed by the construction of pairings, assignments, and maintenance of the planned schedule,” he begins. “Lufthansa Systems’ crew management software solution – NetLine/Crew – provides modules for constructing pairings, assigning pairings or non-duty events and tracking the concurrent operation at the day of operations.
“In the Pairing module, after the flight schedule is imported from a connected flight scheduling system, planners construct the pairings. The Pairing Optimizer combines the legs and checks the corresponding legalities of the created pairings automatically,” Brugger continues. “Flight time limitations and airline-specific collective agreements are considered, where applicable.
“Dynamic flight schedule changes can be processed automatically. Once the pairing construction is completed, NetLine/Crew can generate the crew capacity reports. Those capacity reports also consider planned crewmember absences such as vacation, part-time schedules, long-term absences and training,” he elaborates.
It is at this point, once the pairings have been created, that they are offered for bidding in dedicated crewmember apps. According to Brugger, crewmembers can:
- place requests of various types;
- see a feasibility forecast for requests;
- see an overview of the status of their requests;
- read notifications of forecast and status changes.
“The bid management functionalities are adapted to the corresponding contract of the airlines. Both seniority and fairness factors can be adjusted,” Brugger notes. “Each individually submitted preference is valid throughout a period that is defined by a first and last bidding period.”
Use of optimizers
Optimizers support the Bid Management Process. Here, the interaction of different optimizers lead to the best crew satisfaction and utilization, says the product manager. “The optimizers generate roster solutions automatically. Individual crew preferences are equally considered as a fair assignment of flight hours, duty shifts, stopovers and routings. After bid closure, the optimizer awards the bids according to airline specific rules and seniority.”
In the Assignment and Tracking modules, NetLine/Crew provides all the necessary functions for assigning, de-assigning, and modifying duties, absences and ground activities. “The adherence to legality rules, limitations and expiry dates of checks and licences for the crewmembers are checked immediately, as soon as assignments and modifications are made. Roster change notifications and hotel reservations are created automatically,” Brugger explains.
Using Netline/Crew as a roster solution
An airline using NetLine/Crew has more components available to develop a roster solution for its crews. Beyond the core functions these include: a Scenario Manager to develop multiple solution versions; VacationPlanning; BidManagement; Fairness xOPT; Preferences xOPT; Pairing xOPT; Preference Planner; and Rules – an integrated Rule engine.
James Blamey is VP corporate communications at IBS Software, which acquired Canada-based aviation crew optimization software company AD OPT in 2019. He identifies several ways to create rosters. “The distribution criteria range from seniority, fair share (with crew requests) to equity (no requests),” he comments, before noting that IBS/AD OPT has implemented all of the methods below:
“We provide all the tools necessary to create and manage the entire rostering process, starting with the Planner Interface, where the airline planner sets up the period data, determines the rules and KPIs, and manages the crew request process and creates solutions,” Blamey explains. “We also provide a web-based crew interface where the crewmembers enter their requests.
“The heart of the system is the ‘solver’, which features proprietary technology and is recognised as an industry-leading best of breed optimizer,” he adds. “The solver is responsible for generating and optimising all the crew rosters to qualified crewmembers. Rosters are made up of pairings, standby activities, time off, and pre-assignments.”
Bringing benefits with regular enhancements
With IT applications so vital to the modern rostering process, enhancements to systems are introduced regularly. Blamey describes some of the latest from IBS and some of the benefits they bring to airlines.
“One ongoing enhancement is to shorten solver run times and deliver new features to provide the crewmember with state-of-the-art tools allowing them to have more transparency in the rostering process. These tools allow them to create better requests, resulting in higher quality rosters,” he notes.
“Also under way is a brand-new cloud-based version of our crew planning products,” the VP adds. “This next-generation platform features a web-based interface with a re-imagined user experience and a fully integrated approach to pairing and rostering planning.
“The first product out of the gate is our pairing optimizer which is currently in BETA stages. This new framework will feature a centralised rule management system, allowing a host of synergies between the pairing and rostering planning phases. Airlines will also be able to create and edit their own rules, dramatically reducing turnaround for evaluating the impacts of new or changed rules.
“The extension of these initiatives is to merge the planning and tracking product beyond the standard integration practice and using the resulting data would provide us with insights to improve the quality of the solutions,” Blamey observes.
The resulting data source provides IBS with insights across different areas including improvement of the planning solution quality, the ability to improve schedule robustness, better management of standby levels leading to improved operational stability and crew satisfaction while reducing operational disruptions.
The benefits of a unified system
“On top of this, having crew planning and tracking on a single platform offers several other benefits. From a centrally managed rule engine that simplifies the management and negotiation of crew agreements, to consistent business logic across planning and tracking to highly streamlined workflows. The unified platform will give crew managers greater flexibility while reducing their workload significantly,” Blamey states.
Naturally, Lufthansa Systems has similarly been extending the functionalities of its NetLine/Crew suite to give airlines more options and increased benefits. “Crewmember satisfaction is a key element in the modern rostering process,” Brugger acknowledges. “We seamlessly support the information exchange between the crew planning and tracking office and the crewmembers with our NetLine/Crew Apps.
“With the Interactive Duty Plan (IADP), crewmembers easily access the schedules and details of their roster via an app. Crewmembers can check-in for their duties directly via the duty plan,” he adds. “At the same time, the crew controllers automatically receive feedback that the crewmember has shown up for duty. Roster change notifications are received through the app and can be confirmed by the crewmember in just one click.
“The detailed information page of the IADP provides the flying personnel with comprehensive information on duty times, flight times, due dates for licence renewal or checks and simulators. Additionally, with the TripTrade function, crewmembers can exchange pairings with each other as long as there are no legalities violated like flight hours, working days and so on. Swapping duties is performed automatically without crew planner interaction,” Brugger remarks. “The Crew Scheduler only intervenes when a rule violation occurs in the system and a trade is rejected. An integrated chat solution enables the exchange of information between crewmembers and crew planners for each individual trade.”
According to the senior product manager. by using NetLine/Crew Open Time Management, crewmembers can add, drop and swap flights on their roster, while ensuring that contractual aspects with the airline are met and that sufficient reserve capacity is available.
“Another important aspect for roster generation is certainly the topic of optimization and automation,” says Brugger. “Our goal is to develop optimizers across multiple business domains. To this end, we have launched the NetLine Optimization Desk project. We can see that time horizons are becoming more flexible and decision support and optimization have to be made at increasingly shorter notice to reflect the business dynamics. We are convinced that modern optimization technologies such as artificial intelligence, coupled with algorithm approaches, can quickly deliver great solutions here.
“Finally, yet importantly, we have to talk about the situation after COVID. It is essential to keep an eye on crew training and the necessary qualifications,” Brugger points out. “Currently, network adjustments are quickly made at very short notice. Therefore, it can happen that crewmembers need special training for certain airports. Legal requirements must not be violated under any circumstances, so Crew Qualification and Training Management is an important support element from within NetLine/Crew.”
Fine-tuning the logistics
Once the rosters are fixed, the task is to ensure their crews are transported and, when necessary, suitably accommodated. Brugger confirms that the logistics and automatic handling of changes are an essential part of NetLine/Crew, with the Logistic Desk component supporting automatic hotel booking requests for crewmembers.
“The system identifies automatically the need for logistics based on the crewmember’s schedule and pairings. The identified layover requirements can be managed completely automatically by using the Logistic Desk to connect to a hotel provider’s software that’s capable of connecting with our interfaces.
“This also includes the handling of crewmember information regarding their logistic details within the features of the NetLine/Crew Apps. Equally important is the automatic handling of flight schedule changes which result in a change in the logistics, like adding a flight to a pairing which then requires an additional layover,” Brugger explains. “When processing the ‘add pairing or events’, the layover will be automatically generated, the hotel provider gets the new requirement and responds with a confirmation number. This information, including the changed flights and logistics, is pushed to the IADP where the crew member can confirm the change without any interaction with the crew scheduler.”
At IBS, the iFlight product suite includes a logistics module which supports airlines in managing crew deadheading, accommodation and transportation requirements. According to Blamey, this module has been designed to support whatever style of operation an airline has in its dealings with hotels and transportation, from outsourced to hybrid to inhouse.
The solution offers functionalities in certain key areas. “The first is handling crew entitlements. This covers rules which would define the type of accommodation and transportation depending on crew type, duty details and other agreements/preferences,” Blamey comments. “Next is inventory management which covers handling of inventory from details of hotels, contract details, agreements on availability and usage. The challenge faced by all airlines is to ensure the optimal utilisation of inventory responding to changes in schedules. The solution is designed to respond to these changes in real time.
“Finally, there is the support for third-party service providers. The focus here is to have out-of-the-box integration capability with market leading service providers in this area.
“The challenge that solutions in this space have always struggled with, is the ability to respond to the operational changes in a timely manner – the absence of which leads to operational overheads in terms of wasted resources, cost overheads and operational disruption. This is the advantage we have seen in an integrated logistics module, ensuring that there is the ability to deal with operational changes in real time and an integrated capability helping to reduce the impact,” Blamey emphasises.
And it is the flexibility of those integrated systems which helps to get people to the right place at the right time.
Author: Bernie Baldwin
Published: 8th July 2021
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