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 maximises 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 optimising their flight schedule relative to their full potential, they can unlock an additional one to three per cent of their current revenues – that amounts to millions of dollars for most airlines. Today, Amadeus and Optym announce a new long-term partnership to solve that challenge, in a way that was previously believed impossible.
Optym and Amadeus’ new suite of network planning solutions is based on sophisticated algorithms that give airlines a fully optimised 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.
Dr. Ravi Ahuja, President & CEO, Optym
Optym, which is based in Gainesville, USA, was founded by Dr. Ravi Ahuja, a former professor at the University of Florida in the field of optimisation and mathematical modelling.
As Dr. Ahuja, President and CEO of Optym, comments: “This partnership is a great fit – each party brings complementary strengths, combining our world-class mathematics and proprietary optimisation know-how with Amadeus’ airline experience, size, global reach, and technical sophistication. 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.”
Optym works in other industries, including rail and mining, but Amadeus is exclusively investing in the development of their airline solutions. The partnership has Amadeus contributing its vast knowledge of the airline business and financial support to develop the solutions that have not yet been brought to market. In addition, Amadeus will use its global network to accelerate Optym’s growth plans and sell the solutions worldwide.
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.”
This suite of network planning solutions are offered as the Amadeus SKY suite by Optym. This suite includes two solutions which are already available in the market today – Amadeus SkyMAX by Optym providing schedule optimization, and Amadeus SkySYM by Optym providing schedule reliability simulation. The next three solutions in the suite will deliver schedule forecasting (Amadeus SkyCAST by Optym), schedule management (Amadeus SkyWORKS by Optym), and route frequency optimization (Amadeus SkyPLAN by Optym).
