Airline flight network planners have a tough job. They are responsible for creating flight schedules that consider crews, aircraft, gates, competition, potential disruption and customer demand in a way that maximizes profitability and is operationally feasible. Building such a schedule is a challenging and time consuming prospect for any airline network planner.
But when airlines succeed in optimizing their flight schedule relative to their full potential, they can unlock an additional 1 to 3 percent of their current revenues – that amounts to millions of dollars for most airlines. On Nov. 3, Amadeus and Optym announce a new long-term partnership to solve that challenge.
Optym and Amadeus’ new suite of network planning solutions is based on sophisticated algorithms that give airlines a fully optimized schedule based on accurate forecasts in just a few hours, not days or weeks. This is the only technology on the market that can build a schedule from a “clean sheet”. This means that the solution can create a schedule from scratch—without a previous schedule to work with—thus giving the airline more strategic flexibility and opening new scheduling opportunities that may have previously gone undiscovered.
“This partnership is a great fit – each party brings complementary strengths, combining our world-class mathematics and proprietary optimization know-how with Amadeus’ airline experience, size, global reach and technical sophistication,” said Ahuja, president and CEO of Optym. “We think airline network planning is ready for some new, innovative thinking and we are excited about helping airlines unlock more value from their schedule.”
Julia Sattel, global head of airline IT at Amadeus added, “We want our technology to help airlines succeed in this increasingly competitive market, and that’s why we see network planning and scheduling as a very important area for airlines and their customers. The Optym network planning and scheduling solution is already the best one in the market, and with our help we think it will become truly game-changing.”
