Carmen Crew Rostering integrates seamlessly with other Carmen products, sharing data, legality and user interface. For clients with a complete crew system, the pairing functionality is available together with online data from crew tracking. Carmen Crew Rostering also integrates various rostering concepts, spanning from different ways of creating individual rosters to the management of lines of work (bidlines). This allows the airline to support several rostering models for different crew groups and provides one integrated platform for the evaluation and implementation of future concepts.
Optimization tools are closely linked to Carmen Rave, ensuring that legality and cost structures are always synchronized with the latest business changes. The optimizer will produce a crew roster that respects all relevant constraints on duty time, rest-time, days off, time zones and other similar aspects. In addition to legality and cost structure Carmen Crew Rostering can manage constraints such as different crew bases, different crew agreements, various training aspects, fly below rank, maintaining and using qualifications, imitating previous rosters and various bid models.
The user interface allows for quick analysis of crew rosters as well as manual creation and adjustment of rosters. Crew members and pairings can be sorted or selected using any criteria. Colours and objects can be used to identify important aspects of the crew rosters such as a crew being scheduled close to minimum rest, low credit pairings, granted or denied bids and crew soon requires a line-check. The user interface also contains many powerful commands for the manual editing of individual rosters.
Preferential bidding allows each crew member to bid on roster properties. A bid can be for anything from flight numbers to complex combinations of properties such as attractive layovers, minimum rest, check-in times and credit time limit. Various models are supported to allow a crew member to express priority between different bids. The most common bid models are weighted bids, strictly ordered bids and bid groups. read more>>
Carmen’s preferential bidding uses unique optimization technology that can solve even the largest and most complex bid award problems. The optimizer can manage bid models with strict seniority (as applied at many US carriers) and with seniority influence. The best available crew rosters are awarded at all seniority levels with constant consideration of contractual rules and company targets such as open time constraints. In order for the planner to analyze the result various reasoning reports and system views are provided. The objective is to provide an analysis that makes it possible to measure and to explain the bid status.
You can enter and update bids from home or from a hotel via internet with Carmen’s bid interface, InterBids. The system is very easy to use and no specific software needs to be downloaded. You can easily express your preferences and match these with available general bids. The interface always displays all active bids together with any published roster activities.
Guessing the consequences of a contractual change can prove to be very costly. A minimal change in rest-time or overtime cost structures may result in surprising effects. The combination of Carmen Rave and the optimizers provides a very efficient way of making detailed simulations. Scenarios containing various data, rules or pairing programs can easily be compared. Scenarios used in production planning can evaluate the impact of changes in flight departures, find the most efficient trade-off between quality and overtime costs and evaluate the combined efficiency of various pairing programs etc.
Using Carmen Rave Publisher you can create any specific analysis report. Exactly the same costs and legality definitions used in the roster editor and the optimizer can be used in the customized reports, ensuring that consistent key performance indicators (KPIs) are used in planning and in follow-up reporting. Relevant KPIs could be credit time, required overtime, deadhead hours, standby hours etc.
Individual bids are often distributed in order of seniority. However, at times it may be desirable to distribute special properties equally between all crew members. Examples could be free weekends, attractive layover stations, overtime payment, annual block time, and the total number of assigned standby days. You can define any number of properties or activities to be distributed between different crew members. You can also spread duties with certain properties between crew members in a specific group. For example, you can distribute unattractive standby blocks between standby crew. Equal distribution can be combined with preferential bidding in seniority order.
In addition to creating personal rosters Carmen Crew Rostering can also create bidlines for publication to crew. Carmen Rave can be used to tailor the definition of desirable line properties such as commutability and regularity. The optimizer uses these definitions to create as many attractive bidlines as possible, while still keeping the block time within a specified interval. To further increase the number of attractive lines, Carmen Crew Pairing optimizer can be integrated into the bidline process allowing the creation of trips that are easier to combine to efficient bidlines. read more>>
Carmen InterBids supports line bidding. Attractive lines can be selected with a standing criterion, for example a certain combination of layover, block hours, high credit or specific flight numbers. Lines can also be browsed and requested individually.
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