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Q: Why are you going to Sydney?
A: The organizers have done a very good job in putting an interesting program together. The talks cover many different parts of airline operations, so it's a good environment to share ideas on smart integration - our favourite subject. I feel it's the perfect place for Carmen to be.

Q: So why's integration so important to Carmen? Most of your revenues are from crew scheduling, only two companies use your fleet products, and integrated operations control is still just a research project at Carmen.
A: When a Carmen Pairing user loads some booking information to do a last minute rescheduling of flight attendants, it's integration to us. When a rostering user rebuilds pairings to fit the open slots in the roster, it's integration of pairing and rostering. When she remodels the objective function to make the standby patterns more useful in day of operation, it's also a sort of integration. And all this is done every day by several Carmen users. We call it Power Integration. To make integrated decisions, the left hand's got to know what the right hand is doing. Integrated decisions can be made within crew scheduling, between crew and fleet (as Curt Hjorring will speak about on Friday, 31 August) or revenue management and operations; you name it - there are hundreds of details to be integrated.

Q: Why did you choose to speak about technology rather than the business issues of integration?
A: I think we (Carmen) has an important point to make here. Which is the most facilitating technology for integration? Is it common databases or data modelling? Is it communication, extensible formats and messaging? Is it nice multi-tiered architectures? All these things are fine, and Carmen does all of it, but the real key to integration is something else. Look at the practical examples. Which technology allowed the Carmen users to do rosterable pairings, plan to load, and integrated crew recovery? The answer is Rave. It's always Rave. For the left hand to know what the right hand is doing you need a tool to model the reality of the other hand. That's what Rave does.

When Curt Hjorring does aircraft/crew-syncronized planning for 10 different airlines he uses production systems for crew pairing, then he uses Rave to enter some more modelling to describe the aircraft reality. His counterpart in the tail assignment team uses Rave to describe the crew reality in the aircraft problem. A strong modelling tool like Rave, is a much more powerful enabler of integration than any other technology.

Q: Is this your main message to the delegates in Sydney?
A: Yes. I think we're doing the industry a great service if we help them understand that Rave's what get's integration going.

Q: You start you Australia visit by participating in the Kangaroo Hoppet ski Marathon. Anything integrated about that?
A: Well. Eh. I know Australians are very innovative in all sorts of sports - if they can tell me how to integrate skiing with flying or surfing I'll be very interested. If there's any parallel to airline management, I promise to include it in my talk.

Erik Andersson,
CTO
Carmen Systems AB
[email protected]