Why is performance important; aren't today's optimizers fast enough?
If an optimizer isn't providing the solution instantly, there is definitely room for improvement. Solving a problem within minutes instead of hours will have a direct impact on the planning process, along with the ability to react to changes. Of course, increased performance is also needed to be able to solve more comprehensive planning problems.

Why is it necessary to solve bigger problems?
There is always great potential from increasing the scope. Let’s look at crew planning as an example. Deciding which crew member shall operate which flights is today done by first creating anonymous crew blocks, also called pairings. After this the pairings are combined into individual crew rosters. The pairing step exists because historically the problem was too big to solve in one step. However, this is not the case anymore. For the integrated crew planning problem the potential for improvements in cost savings and in reduced process time is much larger compared to the sequential approach. Within a few years from now I believe that separate planning of pairings and rosters will be considered old-fashioned.

So when you talk about increasing the scope, you really mean doing more crew planning simultaneously?
Yes, and there are also other potential areas, one example is planning crew and vehicles together. In practice the crew members and the vehicles must be at least synchronized for critical connections, but the planning of them is usually separated. Our experience both from real operation and from experiments show that synchronizing the planning of aircraft and crew makes it possible to reduce the crew cost. More importantly, it also makes it possible to increase the operational stability by eliminating the majority of the critical aircraft changes.

How can the transition to integrated planning be achieved?
Flexibility! All our products support our legality language Carmen Rave. This provides our clients the necessary flexibility to cope with long-term process changes as well as short-term changes in planning practices. Today our clients actively use this tool to calibrate both the daily production and also to perform simulations. The feedback from our clients is that they achieve an additional average saving of around 2% as a result from the ability to constantly adjust properties like legality, quality and detailed costs.

What is the most interesting development at the moment?
One particular area that I think will be of great importance is the introduction of roster analysis and roster repair functionality. This will now be available in a number of additional functionality packages which allow rosters to be repaired, compared and re-optimized. The ability to analyze the difference between the original plans and the final outcome collectively with the tools for re-optimizing already published rosters will make it possible to dramatically reduce the number of problems that reach the day of operation.