Navitaire's Planning Optimization Suite allows airlines to develop optimal aircraft and crew schedules in the planning stage, increasing efficiency and utilization of aircraft and crew. Our technology evaluates millions of possible schedule combinations in just minutes, enabling your airline to easily generate multiple solutions that optimize crew resources and conduct "what if" analysis when desired. Solutions can even be developed remotely with this portable, yet high-powered, application that can run on a laptop.
Depending on the size and complexity of your operation, Navitaire's Planning Optimization Suite can help you save from three to five percent of total crew cost and increase your aircraft utilization.
The four modules of the Planning Optimization Suite boost the performance of your underlying operations management and crew solutions systems. These modules are fully integrated, and may be combined or used individually: A single, integrated database allows the modules to populate flight schedules, operational rules and cost information from the same data source. An integrated rules engine ensures the modules factor in the same government regulations, business rules and contract rules. Integration also allows airline staff to run extensive detailed and summary reports for all optimization activities.
- Aircraft Schedule Optimizer helps flight schedulers build optimal daily, weekly or fully dated aircraft routings for a given flight schedule. It assigns individual flights into anonymous lines of flying to minimize the number of lines required to operate the schedule while maximizing route consistency. For further optimization, the Schedule Optimizer integrates with Navitaire's Pairing Optimizer to easily generate crew schedules that follow aircraft routings.
- Pairing Optimizer automatically creates the lowest-cost set of crew pairings for flights operated within a specified timeframe. This fast, flexible optimizer incorporates user-controlled parameters that include a wide variety of both "hard" crew rules and "soft" crew quality-of-life elements. The Pairing Optimizer also enables crew planners to generate pairings for combined international and domestic schedules, automatically enforcing both sets of rules and allowing specification of additional global constraints.
- Roster Optimizer generates equitable and highly productive crew rosters that cover all the flights in the roster period while taking into account pre-assigned crew activities. In addition to parameters in the integrated rules engine, crew planners can input lower and upper bounds and penalties to control the amount of block time, duty time and pay allowances desired in the rosters. Roster Optimizer uses this information to calculate an optimized solution.
- Bidline Optimizer develops generic bidlines for each period that are ready for the crew bidding process. It incorporates multiple flexible parameters to accommodate seniority-based environments and create schedules that meet desired trip attributes. The Bidline Optimizer builds both bidline-holder and reserve bidline schedules to meet minimum guarantee levels. Once a bidline is committed, crew planners can directly input the bidline into the crew bidding system without additional configuration.
Navitaire's Planning Optimization Suite allows airlines to develop more reliable and operable aircraft and crew schedules in the planning stage, increasing efficiency and the utilization of aircraft and crew. Optimal schedules also improve recovery options in the event of severe weather, sick calls or other unplanned events.