Initial Situation 

The fix costs are particularly high in aviation. Optimising the aircraft utilisation and maintenance planning can save millions of francs. With a tighter integration of the planning stages and better algorithms, the savings were significantly increased.

Successes

We convinced the management to start a reengineering project to automate the planning steps further and integrate them better into the overall planning flow. For this purpose we created a business case as well as built and demonstrated a prototype for a scheduling algorithm.

We successfully completed the development and implementation. Using a modern modular software architecture and clearly defining domains and boundaries, we significantly accelerated the software development.

Activities

As project manager and software architect we:

  • Analysed the business processes and operating procedures and elicited the requirements of the stakeholders.
  • Defined the approach to replace the existing modules.
  • Designed the solution (software architecture, data model, functionality, user interface, interfaces).
  • Co-developed automatic planning algorithms based on linear programming.
  • Led a software development team.
  • Implemented a new planning platform with the modules “Flight Scheduling” and “Aircraft Assignment”.
  • Coordinated the testing and documentation.

Keywords

  • Aircraft Assignment and Reassignment
  • Flight Scheduling
  • Maintenance Planning
  • Software Architecture
  • Object Oriented Design and Development
  • Operational Research

Remark: We performed the above-mentioned activities as employee at a former employer.