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ILOG Connection is produced by the Communication Department of ILOG S.A. in Gentilly, France |
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ISD NEWS Finding the Right Solution ILOG's Industry Solutions Division covers a diverse range of markets, from transportation, defense and aerospace to insurance, banking and finance. Many companies are improving the services that they offer through the Web, with automation based on ILOG optimization and business rule components, while others are continuing to focus on core applications. In this issue, we see how Southwest Airlines and Rome International Airport better schedule operations with ILOG optimization, and Providence Washington and Prima Solutions simplify the search for insurance, with online solutions based on ILOG JRules. 
Southwest Airlines Schedules Faster Southwest Airlines has upgraded with ILOG optimization and business rule software components to increase the performance and speed of the airline's crew scheduling system. By using the ILOG Parallel CPLEX optimizer and simplifying code implementation with ILOG JRules, Southwest has greatly reduced the time required to generate crew schedules for its 2,700 daily flights. "Southwest is committed to employee satisfaction and customer service," says Rusty Burlingame, Southwest system engineer. "By using ILOG optimization engines, we're able to create schedules that have our crews staying closer to home, while being gone fewer days, and spending less time idle in airports." 
When creating a schedule, Southwest must take into consideration more than 15,000 scheduling constraints, which include FAA regulations, Federal Aviation Regulation contractual provisions and the airline's own "quality of life" standards. In addition, with 2,700 daily flights, approximately 3,000 pilots and 6,000 flight attendants, Southwest must contend with 750,000 crew duties, or "variables." A typical weekly schedule involves nearly 2 million variables and more than 90,000 constraints. Previously, Southwest used only ILOG CPLEX. By upgrading to ILOG Parallel CPLEX, the airline can now break up a complex scheduling problem into smaller pieces and run ILOG CPLEX's mathematical algorithms for solving complex business problems on four CPUs, instead of just one. This enables the airline to generate a crew schedule in seven to 10 hours, far less time than the previous 36 to 48 hours. The more efficient crew scheduling system also lets Southwest address unexpected operational changes, making necessary adjustments to crew schedules. This leads to better on-time performance and schedules for crews, and results in improved customer service. ILOG JRules allows Southwest to implement changes in operating rules and regulations much faster in the crew scheduler. The business rule engine uses a simple language that can be easily customized to ease application development and deployment, and future maintenance by non-technical personnel. Furthermore, ILOG JRules works externally, leaving the main code of the application untouched.
Rome International Airport Adopts
Saïga More than 29 million passengers flow through Rome International Airport (RIA) annually, and helping to ensure they reach their destinations is Saïga, Steria's resource planning and scheduling system using ILOG optimization, visualization and business rule software components. In just six months, Steria and its Italian partner, Datamat, were able to adapt Saïga to the specific constraints of the airport. The system now controls virtually everything at the airport, from check-in counters and luggage conveyor belts to plane parking stands and bus and other ground vehicles and equipment. 
"We needed a system proven to cut costs, smoothen operations, and basically take much of the stress out of running the airport," says Carlo Pietrossanti, RIA CIO, "and we didn't want to wait years to get it. Saïga's performance at the Paris airports sold us on the application, and we understand that the ILOG software engines coupled with Steria's expertise and know-how made deploying the system in just a few months possible." The flexibility, open architecture and ready-made algorithms and graphics of ILOG Solver, ILOG Views, ILOG Server and ILOG Rules enable Saïga to quickly and accurately assign resources, including personnel. The system is structured in modules for different operations:
Every day the airport must allocate resources to arriving and departing aircraft. These resources must be carefully assigned to give every plane full support and its owner full access to it, with the goal of quickly processing as many as 90,000 air travelers daily. The key component in Saïga is ILOG Solver. The industry's most advanced constraint programming software engine, it processes tens of thousands of constraints per minute in scheduling operations at the airport. Its results are then visualized with a user interface incorporating the ILOG Views Gantt chart. To give airport planners access to the schedules, Saïga uses a distributed architecture built with ILOG Server and ILOG Rules. It allows users to monitor the implementation of a plan and react quickly to unforeseen events such as flight delays or equipment failure. Over the past 15 years, more than 40 airports have hired Steria to develop IT systems for airport management, flight information display, baggage handling and other crucial operations. The RIA project further strengthens Steria's position as a leading expert in airport management solutions, and ILOG as a provider of software components for those solutions.
Providence Washington Switches
to Rules Providence Washington, a property and casualty insurance company, has selected ILOG JRules for use in the company's new insurance underwriting application. The XML-centric business rule engine is expected to reduce the time it takes the company to generate insurance quotes by as much as 90 percent. Providence is planning to use the application in its $200 million commercial underwriting division. 
"Working with ILOG was an easy choice for our company," says Ed Leveille, vice president and CIO at Providence Washington, "as they are the only vendor providing the capability to transmit business rules and accompanying data in an XML format. With XML rapidly becoming the commonly accepted format for data exchange, our organization continues to show its commitment to this new standard. That said, ILOG's continued commitment to research and development will ensure that we remain at the forefront of business rule technology." Providence's current process is paper intensive and time consuming. It involves gathering information, faxing it to several people, qualifying the applicant and then determining a rate, often taking several weeks to complete. 
Using the new application with ILOG JRules, the company will drastically reduce the time it takes to process an application and answer inquiries from independent insurance agents. More over, its underwriters will be able to spend less time generating quotes, since it will be done automatically, and more time focusing on complex underwriting policy decisions. ILOG JRules can directly process XML data, a unique capability for the business rule engine. It not only makes XML-based applications faster and more dynamic, but also provides the foundation for allowing business rules to travel through the Web with XML data. Providence foresees the sharing of data through XML with its independent agents, and the ILOG rule engine fully streamlining the insurance procurement process. Ultimately, issuing insurance will go from days, or even weeks, to hours and eventually just minutes.
Prima Solutions Creates Insurance
Hub
Specializing in solutions for online insurance provisioning, Prima Solutions has built a collaborative commerce platform that enables users to access and compare policies from different insurers. Built with ILOG JRules, the first business rule engine to wholly support eXtensible Markup Language (XML), the platform standardizes the way data is exchanged between insurance carriers and distributors. 
"ILOG JRules was the obvious choice for this application because of its direct integration of XML and unmatched speed," says Hugues Delannoy, general manager of Prima Solutions. "We needed a stable product that could interact with insurers' systems in real time. ILOG JRules works directly with XML, which the insurance industry is rapidly adopting as the standard for sharing information." Prima Solutions uses Insurance Products Mark-Up Language (INSpML), the XML-based protocol for the insurance industry. With the ILOG JRules business rule engine, the Prima platform is able to process thousands of inquiries per hour. Among those already using the platform are online insurance portal Assurland, major civil servant credit distributor Credit Social de Fonctionnaires (CSF), and car insurance provider Idassur. For Assurland, the Prima platform is proving to be a competitive advantage. Its one-stop shopping convenience and fast, accurate policy matching have enabled the Internet service to sign up more than 1,000 customers per month for 19 of the top insurance companies, including Lloyd's of London, GMS and Winterthur. CFS is using the platform as a way for its sales force to compare insurance products and offer them to customers. The platform has enabled CFS to provide a better shopping experience. The same has been the case with Idassur, which offers insurance services through 1,500 car dealerships. With the Prima platform, Idassur enables car buyers to compare different insurance policies in real time at the dealerships. Prima's use of XML is an example of a growing trend in the insurance industry. XML holds the promise of meeting the long-held need for commonality in transferring data, and insurers worldwide are quickly adapting their IT systems to use XML. This trend is affecting every industry dependent on data sharing, from manufacturing and transportation to telecommunications and finance. As the first XML-centric business rule engine, ILOG JRules can accept and process XML data directly, without adapters, complex mappings or special translation code. The ILOG component also reduces development time and cost for more rapid deployment, and renders greater performance from applications needing to exchange data in XML. Furthermore, ILOG JRules lets people express rules in their own business language, instead of a developer's. This gives decision-makers such as sales and marketing personnel direct access to the logic of an ILOG JRules-based application.
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