TRANSPORTATION NEWS

Carmen Systems and ILOG Team Up
Partnership to create new Web-accessible scheduling solutions for airline industry

Leaders in airline scheduling and software components respectively, Carmen Systems  and ILOG have formed a long-term partnership to power Carmen management solutions with ILOG products.

Encompassing ILOG optimization and visualization software, the partnership will greatly benefit Carmen in developing systems supporting future operations management of air carriers around the world. Already a longtime user of ILOG CPLEX, Carmen plans to provide a new generation of integrated decision-support solutions for crew and fleet scheduling and yield management, better applying Carmen’s long experience with the airline industry. The products are to be fully Web-accessible, allowing crews to remotely check their schedules and give their work preferences via the Internet.

With the ILOG components, Carmen is expected to dramatically reduce its development costs and bring new scheduling products to market more quickly. Using ILOG’s proven software also means fewer risks for both Carmen and its customers.

"The partnership with ILOG fits seamlessly with our overall strategy to use building blocks of standard software to shorten time to market," says Ola Tiverman, R&D director at Carmen Systems. "The decision was based on our excellent working relationship and ILOG’s leading-edge products."

Carmen, which counts seven of Europe’s top eight airlines among its customers, will use ILOG Solver to support planning agents in making complex decisions on crew scheduling. ILOG Solver uses advanced constraint programming technology to answer problems for such mission-critical operations as the planning of thousands of flight movements and the assigning of personnel based on preferences and regulations.

Carmen has also chosen ILOG JViews as the Java visualization engine for the Web-enabled graphical user interfaces (GUIs) of the scheduling products. Highly customizable, ILOG JViews allows a GUI to be configured exactly to the requirements of an air carrier. Carmen will use ILOG JViews to display a complete range of planning graphics, including slip charts, maps and Gantt charts showing up to 50,000 tasks.

"We are very pleased that Carmen Systems, with its leading position in European airline operations management, has decided to partner with us," says Pierre Haren, ILOG CEO. "Carmen Systems is a leading provider of airline crew management systems based on optimization. With the assistance of ILOG’s software, I am convinced that they will enable the airlines to reach new heights in performance and quality of service."