Efficient crew planning for airlines of all sizes and business models
The primary task of a crew planner is to create the most cost-efficient rotation plans possible for pilots and flight attendants. This task is complicated by the fact that a crew member's place of residence doesn't always coincide with the requirements of the flight plan. For example, it may be that 70 percent of all rotations start in Frankfurt, but only 40 percent of the crew members actually live there. This usually leads to considerable additional expenses in the form of overnight costs, transportation costs and lost working days.
Unlike conventional crew management systems, the optimizer can generate deployment plans which keep these expenses down. Another complication is that cockpit and cabin crews may not be evenly distributed across all stations – that is, 40 percent of the pilots may live in Frankfurt, but only 20 percent of the flight attendants. The latest generation of optimizers from Lufthansa Systems can handle this problem as well.
The optimizer was developed in cooperation with the Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik in Berlin, one of the world's leading research institutes in the field of applied mathematics and computer science. NetLine/Crew Pairing xOPT is the first product of its type, and it is already achieving outstanding results for German leisure airline Condor.
Using the same technology, Lufthansa Systems is currently developing an innovative IT tool for optimizing crew rosters.