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ECO.2000 is a powerful, user-friendly crew pairing and assignment system, designed to meet the rigorous and dynamic requirements of commercial airlines, skyrocketing them into the next century. ECO.2000 is the result of intensive collaborative research and development by IBM Haifa Research Labs and El Al Israel Airlines Ltd.
ECO.2000 is based on state-of-the-art software and hardware technologies. It is built on robust software components, as part of IBM's software strategy, including an object-oriented Graphic User Interface (GUI), IBM's database technology (DB/2), the IBM Unix Operating System (AIX) and proprietary optimization software; all running on the powerful RS/6000 workstation.
ECO.2000 utilizes these advanced technologies and intensive on-site developments to solve the problems of scheduling cockpit and cabin crew and balancing workloads and benefits among individual employees while minimizing costs for management and operation.
Using ECO.2000's comprehensive and integrated functions, airline planning professionals can automatically generate monthly flight plans at a minimum cost. Users of ECO.2000 can expect monthly savings of 3 to 8% off the operational costs of crew pairing and assignment.
The ECO.2000 modular design seamlessly integrates three subsystems:
- Pairing: Creates the most favorable pairing sequences of duties and rest periods away from home.
- Assignment: Assigns crew to the optimized pairings.
- Data Manager: Manages the flow of data, such as which captains fly which model of airplane, employee overtime, special requests, rules for rest, and which airplanes are needed for specific flights.
Each subsystem is accessed through a consistent and highly intuitive GUI, which seamlessly oversees and controls the flow of data from the ECO.2000 databases.
Practical Uses
ECO.2000 takes El Al's problems of flights, duties and pairings, time and space dimensions, and billions of combinations and creates a solution to meet the airline's objectives. This solution satisfies the legal criteria of duties and rest, completes flight schedule coverage, minimizes costs, and optimizes use of resources.
Every airline company adheres to different rules making it hard to create one standardized scheduling program. These rules can include different requirements for rest, number of crew aboard the plane, and retiring age of captains.
IBM is about solutions and in striving for a solution to this universal scheduling problem, ECO.2000 can be customized for other airlines and the rules they follow.
Unique Qualities
IBM and nearly 20 other vendors responded to the El Al Israel Airlines tender to solve the airline's rostering and crew pairing problems. It took the airline six years to find a winner and it was IBM who came out number one and succeeded in creating the best product.
In the end, ECO.2000's deep computing solution of a specially designed combination of mathematical modeling, computation power, and heuristics, significantly reduced the time required to solve the problem, and resulted in a 5 to 7% decrease in variable crew related costs and a 4 to 6% increase in crew utilization.
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