News

September 21, 1998: Aeromexico implements Carmen in record time

Aeromexico, the leading airline in central America, has signed a leasing contract for the Carmen Pairing system. After a short benchmark in June this year, Aeromexico crews were flying Carmen-produced pairings already in July. This is an all-time implementation record.

Carmen is very impressed with Aeromexico's determination to go ahead. Naturally, the cost savings are great, and Aeromexico has also been very successful in using Carmen's rule flexibility in negotiations. With a single-base operation of more than 2500 weekly flight legs, the Aeromexico network has many similarities to those of the large European carriers, so it makes a lot of sense to share experiences across the Atlantic.

We welcome Aeromexico to the users' group, and we're looking forward to a fruitful cooperation!

September 21, 1998: SJ in production with Carmen Fleet

Since June 1998, the Swedish State Railways (SJ) is in production with Carmen Fleet for scheduling of locomotives. Flexibility and speed have proven to be important benefits since the Carmen Fleet system was successfully implemented at SJ - the major railway operator in Sweden.

"The introduction of a sophisticated tool for scheduling, simulation and analysis is important but the benefits in cost savings are of vital importance for our competitiveness", emphasizes Jolanta Drott, project manager at SJ.

"The introduction of modern IT is absolutely necessary for managing a railway operation, which is such a complex industrial system. We need improvements in speed, flexibility, and of course, cost savings to refine our production processes. The Carmen Fleet has been developed in close cooperation with us. And we are convinced that we now have a modern tool for optimizing our locomotive fleet. Carmen Fleet helps us to decide what type of locomotive to use for a certain assignment, and it also creates rotations for all locomotives", says Jolanta Drott, who is in charge of modernizing the processes for resource utilization of both crew and rolling stock such as locomotives and wagons.

September 21, 1998: Spanair in production

Since June 1998, Carmen Pairing has been in full production at Spanair - all according to the plan. Carmen Pairing is used for the cockpit and cabin in all Spanair's fleet: MD 80 and Boeing 767. With its 24 aircraft and six bases, Spanair combines charter and scheduled flights. The next step is to put Carmen Crew Assignment into production, which is planned for late 1998.

The Spanair pairing problem is real tricky. The base distribution and OAG search problems are among the most complicated that Carmen has solved so far. The rules for crew augmentation and the language restrictions compound the problems. Despite this, the implementation project has been running very smoothly.

"It's a pleasure to work with Spanair!" says Erik Kilborn, Project Manager, Carmen. "The company is young and flexible; it has short decision-making paths and highly competent IT personnel. From the very start of the project, we have worked in close cooperation with Spanair's experienced planners. These types of efforts make a project successful."

Because of the good cooperation between Carmen and Spanair, the difficult pairing problems could be solved within the project plan's time frame. SAS also contributed its planning expertise during the pairing phase. The project is a success, and all involved parties are satisfied.

Here's what Spanair representatives have to say about Carmen Pairing:

"It's the first time I've seen a system that truly optimizes crew utilization. It's funny, because we actually must stop the system from going too far!"

Manuel Ma�as
Deputy Director, Operations

"After 15 years of experience in crew planning I'm fascinated when I work with Carmen because it allows planners to use their experiences and knowledge, which they can direct into the system. This results in a perfect symbiosis."

Paz Men�ndez
Cockpit Planner

"One of Carmen's qualities that I admire the most is its flexibility. It lets users achieve the desired solution, which can be selected from an enormous number of possible options. Users can configure menus and reports the way they want them. And they can create required parameters and rules to enable major control for obtaining the final solution."

Tomeu Cabot
Project Coordinator

"Just like other women, Carmen organizes our lives."

Spanair pilot

July 9, 1998: Iberia - a new customer!

Iberia, Spain's largest airline, is Carmen's newest customer. In June, Iberia and Carmen signed a letter of intent for Carmen Pairing, Carmen Crew Assignment, and Carmen's Preferential Bidding system. The contract between Iberia and Carmen will be worked out and signed in August/September. The contract applies to all fleet and for both cockpit and cabin personnel. This will be one of Carmen's largest business deals.

Carmen now serves 11 airlines. With Iberia, Carmen will serve the eight largest European airlines. "Iberia is an important, strategic customer," says Per Nor�n, Carmen's Managing Director. "Iberia was a missing puzzle piece on the European map. The deal with Iberia strengthens Carmen's position in Europe, and we will continue work closely with our European customers. With Europe as a base, we will go global and reach customers in other parts of the world, such as North and South America and Asia."

Iberia is Europe's seventh largest airline with 3600 flights per week. It employs 1500 pilots and 3100 cabin personnel. Carmen will work closely with Iberia's representatives on site in Spain.

We warmly welcome Iberia to Carmen!

June 2, 1998: Carmen Crew Tracking

Carmen's goal is to provide system support for crew management from strategic planning through to the day of operation. It has also been our customers' goal, to have a total, integrated crew management system. We believe that our long experience with crew management and planning, our excellent competence in optimization techniques and our flexible modelling languages will give us a leading position in crew tracking, as we have in crew planning.

The Carmen Crew Tracking product will help you administer and repair published crew schedules, efficiently and quickly, whenever there is a disruption. A disruption may be a timetable change, an equipment change, delays, sick leaves etc. The major differences from planning are the time pressure and the need to find a solution that minimizes the number of crew included in changes.

The product development project will deliver a beta version of Carmen Crew Tracking before summer 1999. This beta version will support concurrent multi-user update access on object level (using the ObjectStore database) and include some automatic repair tools with optimization. With some help from one or two beta testing customers we will have a production version before the end of 1999.

A second release is already planned for the third quarter 2000, including on-line interfaces to other systems, more manual and automatic repair functions, data management for different versions of plans, better rule exception handling, improved user interface, administrative support, support for other databases etc.

April 9, 1998: Success at British Airways

British Airways (BA) is now using Carmen for its short-haul trip planning. The contract was signed in May 1997, at the last Agifors meeting in London, and the system was used in production in December 1997. The implementation of a trip planning system for an airline of BA's magnitude can be tremendously complex. There are several different rule bases, variable crewing problems, multiple bases, a lot of surrounding systems to interface etc. But, the implementation for BA was running very smoothly.

"It's been a great experience to work with BA!", says Erik Andersson, Project Manager Carmen. "Everything seems to be very professionally managed at BA, but we were particularly encouraged by the short-haul planners. They were running the whole implementation process, and started to use the system creatively from day one."

BA's management is also pleased. "The efficiencies to the company are as hoped for and the speed is spectacular, and we can now explore new opportunities for improving the quality of our trips", says Martin Powell, Project Manager British Airways.

April 9, 1998: Air France continues with all fleet

The prototyping project between Air France and Carmen Systems, to evaluate if Carmen's products can meet the Air France requirements, has been deemed a success. Air France has decided to continue into production with Carmen Pairing for all its fleet, and to let Carmen configure Carmen Crew Assignment with Preferential Bidding for all its fleet, aiming towards production.

The pairing product has been used in protected production for short-haul since the end of January 1998. It is planned that all Air France pairings should be planned with the Carmen products from this summer. Furthermore, by replacing parts of the currently used Mainframe system "Carmen will help Air France take care of a part of the Y2K-problem and we achieve huge benefits from Carmen's simulation capabilities", says Ronan Saliou, Air France's Project Manager for the Pairing installation project.

The Crew Assignment prototyping clearly shows that Carmen can manage large crew populations. More than 1800 crew have successfully been managed at the same time. If no major problems occur in the configuring, the first crew group is planned to be taken into production this autumn, and all crew groups, i.e. 12,000 crew members, are to be taken into production in 1999.

April 9, 1998: SAS Commuter in production

At the end of April 1997, Carmen Systems and SAS Commuter signed an agreement covering Carmen Pairing, Carmen Crew Assignment and Preferential Bidding. Carmen Pairing was taken into production in September 1997. Carmen Crew Assignment went into production for cockpit crew in December 1997, followed by parts of the cabin crew in March 1998. Production setting for the rest of the cabin crew is planned for before this summer.

SAS Commuter was the first mid-size carrier to join the Carmen user group. SAS Commuter has 27 aircraft and four bases. The planning problem is a relatively complex short-haul problem with crew from three different countries and a very uneven base distribution.

April 9, 1998: Carmen is expanding!

Today, Carmen Systems is the market leader in crew scheduling on the airline and rail industries. We offer technically advanced products and are continuously increasing our customer base. To meet and exceed our customers' demands and to be able to provide better products and services, we co-operate closely with our customers. We have also developed a flexible and functional organization consisting of three departments: Customer Projects, Product Development and Marketing/Sales. To meet our objectives we are expanding all our departments. Since December last year Carmen has employed an extra 13 people. Today we number almost 50 people at Carmen Systems!

This expansion means Carmen Systems can run six large customer projects at the same time - this can be compared to last year when we ran two projects. Jens Kanstrup Kristensen, a former Management Consultant now employed by Carmen, says; "It's a great challenge to start working with Carmen! The organization is very dynamic, you meet people from all over the world work ing in a number of ad hoc projects".

Furthermore, Carmen Systems is currently focusing on opimization performance in an Optimization team. This team is also working with two EU projects, PAROS and PARROT. The purpose with PAROS is to improve the Carmen Pairing optimizer. The participants are Carmen, Lufthansa, Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden and the University of Patras, Greece. In the PARROT project Carmen, ILOG, Lufthansa Systems, Olympic Airways, the University of Athens and the University of Paderborn are working with improving the Carmen Crew Assignment optimizer.

Carmen Systems has also established a Tracking team which is responsible for developing a tracking system based on the existing Carmen Pairing and Carmen Crew Assignment products. Documentation and quality testing are two other areas which we now are focusing on. Carmen Systems has also strengthened the group working on improving existing products.

Another great innovation at Carmen is the Carmen Training Centre - a fully equipped training centre allowing 8 users to train simultaneously. Every week we have training activities with customers from different companies participating on the same courses. Whenever you visit Carmen Systems you can be sure to meet customers!

February 12, 1998: Alitalia chooses Carmen Crew Assignment

The Alitalia Group SpA, Italy's largest carrier with 175 aircraft and 2,000 cockpit crew, has ordered Carmen Systems' rostering system Carmen Crew Assignment with Preferential Bidding. The product will be tailored for the Alitalia Group's cockpit crew. It is expected to go into production in two steps, the final being in February 1999.

Ferdinando Dandini de Sylva, Vice President Operations Planning and Scheduling at Alitalia, explains why Alitalia chose Carmen Systems: "There are several reasons for this. Perhaps the most important is the speed - only one year - at which the customization will be done. It is also important that the supplier has shown good results with the installation of Carmen Pairing here at Alitalia."

Mathias Kremer, Project Manager at Carmen Systems: "We will work closely together with our Italian friends for one year, and they are really excited about the features of our product. We will, for example, handle many different bid types that are impossible to fulfil with the current rostering procedures."

January 12, 1998: Spanair, Carmen's newest customer

Spanair is Carmen Systems' newest customer. The Carmen Pairing and the Carmen Crew Assignment systems are currently being implemented for all fleet and crew categories at Spanair. It is Carmen Systems' second customer within charter traffic. The German charter carrier Condor (a subsidiary of Lufthansa) has been scheduling its crew with Carmen since 1994.

Spanair is a growing Spanish airline that combines charter and scheduled operations, the latter becoming increasingly important. It is based on Mallorca but has hubs and crew bases throughout Spain, and temporary bases in other countries. The fleet currently consists of 20 MD-80 and two Boeing 767 aircraft. This causes some complicated pairing problems.

The first step in the phase-in of Carmen Systems' products is to customize the Carmen Pairing system, with production setting planned for the spring of 1998. The Carmen Crew Assignment system is to follow and its production setting is planned for late 1998.

November 27, 1997: Alitalia enters rental agreement

The Alitalia Group SpA, one of Carmen Systems' first customers for the Carmen Pairing product, has upgraded its previous maintenance contract into a rental contract. This means that Alitalia, as well as the subsidiary Alitalia Team, in addition to the usual software maintenance will receive all future versions of the Carmen Pairing product, designed to give both companies enhanced functionality, robustness, speed and productivity.

The Alitalia Group SpA is the third Carmen customer to enter a rental agreement. Previously both British Airways and SAS Commuter have chosen this form of contract, which ensures a stable long-term relation and gives Carmen Systems enhanced possibilities to direct resources into product development. Rental customers do not have to spend time on negotiating for prices and other conditions at the time of each new release, at the same time as being guaranteed an important role in the planning of new functions for coming versions.

September 25, 1997: Success for the 1997 Carmen User Conference

The annual Carmen User Conference was held during September 22-23 in Rome. It was hosted by Alitalia and Carmen Systems in cooperation. More than 80 delegates attended the conference, most of which represented the large community of European airlines using Carmen's products. Also represented was the Swedish State Railways and a number of potential customers.

During the two days of the conference, a number of presentations on such various topics as marketing, product development, and how to most efficiently utilise Carmen's products was given. Break-out sessions were held in parallel to presentations, giving the most interested the chance to go into deeper discussions in smaller groups.
A cocktail party marked the start of the conference, and a fantastic Roman dinner, hosted by Alitalia, was certainly an appreciated mid-conference happening.

August 15, 1997: Swedish Railways orders Carmen Fleet

Swedish Railways (SJ) has been testing a prototype of the Carmen Fleet locomotive assignment and scheduling product for a few months. The tests showed possible savings in the number of needed locomotives of up to 5% when compared to manually constructed plans.

SJ has decided to take Carmen Fleet into production, and has now ordered a full scale system. The product will be ready by the end of 1997.

The Carmen Fleet system uses automatic optimising algorithms and interactive graphical tools, and also the flexibility provided by the Carmen Rule Language. This makes the product very well suited for tactical as well as operational planning tasks.

The development of Carmen Fleet is the first step into the new area of equipment planning for Carmen Systems. A similar product for aircraft planning will follow.

June 18, 1997: Skr 30 million contract with British Airways

An agreement has been signed with British Airways for the use of Carmen's system in route planning for the airline's 15,000 crew members. The order is worth more than 30 million Skr over a five-year period and British Airways, which is the biggest airline in Europe, will play an active part in the ongoing development of the product. In the past year, Carmen has established the industrial standard for crew planning among European airlines. In addition to British Airways, Lufthansa, SAS and Alitalia, the system is also being used by KLM, Swissair, Air France and others.

Carmen Systems AB is expected to continue its rapid expansion to encompass the Asian market, while also extending the areas of application for the product. Initial development of the system used by SJ, the Swedish State Railways, has yielded promising results and contacts with other European rail operators have confirmed that this is also a very interesting market.

June 4, 1997: Carmen opens new WWW service

Carmen has started a WWW server. It can be found under the address http://www.carmen.se and provides visitors with eg. company news and information on airline and railway products. For Carmen's exisiting customers, the news section is especially interesting. Says Mathias Kremer at Carmen: "We know that more and more of our existing and potential customers use the Internet to get up-to-date information quickly. The news section of our new service is a very good complement to the newsletter Carmen's Voice, since we can get info out in a matter of minutes."

You can expect to find more info on Carmen quicker in our new news section, but the much appreciated newsletter service will of course continue as before, giving you printed information on the most important news in the Carmen world.

May 13, 1997: Carmen under new ownership

In April, a long-awaited deal was closed, involving the buy-out of Carmen Systems from its previous owner, the AdOpt Carmen Group. The new owners consist of the Carmen staff, the Swedish investment company Bure/Innovationskapital and the Dutch investment fund Gilde, which formerly had a shareholding in the AdOpt Carmen Group but has now moved its investment completely to Carmen. The three parties hold about one third of the shares each.

Gunnar Falck, new Chairman of the Board at Carmen, says "The new owners are all committed to strengthening Carmen's role as the leading partner in the industry. Our commitment to R&D; and product development will further increase, and I am certainly looking forward to participating in the work of providing our present and future customers with the best of support in their crew and equipment planning.