Carmen Systems AB announces that Northwest Airlines, the world's fourth largest airline, has signed a 6 year contract for the use of Carmen’s Crew Pairing System to plan the schedules for over 15,000 crewmembers.

The software allows Northwest Airlines to increase productivity and operational reliability while providing greater flexibility throughout the planning process.

As part of this cooperation, Northwest Airlines has already been operating crew pairings planned by Carmen. In order to maintain these savings for Northwest, Carmen will continue to provide monthly crew planning during product implementation.

Jeff Putnam, VP, System Operations Control and Flight Operations Administration at Northwest Airlines said that the implementation of Carmen Crew Pairing will continue to assist Northwest to increase productivity and cut costs.

Together with Carmen’s state-of-the-art optimization, Northwest Airlines will also obtain access to Carmen’s unique parameter and rule tool, Carmen Rave.

“Combining Carmen’s powerful optimization with the proprietary rule language, Carmen Rave, will provide Northwest with the ability to constantly control and improve the productivity, robustness and quality of our monthly solutions,” concluded Jeff Putnam.

Carmen Systems President and CEO, Per Norén said, “With the Northwest Airlines agreement we now provide four of the ten largest airlines in the world with significant increases in productivity through Carmen’s crew pairing optimization. This further establishes Carmen as the leader in crew planning optimization solutions for the aviation industry.”

Carmen Systems AB delivers integrated planning and decision-support solutions for airlines and railways. Clients include, amongst others, Northwest Airlines, Aeroméxico, Air France, Alitalia, British Airways, Iberia, KLM, Lufthansa, Philippine Airlines, SAS, Singapore Airlines, Deutsche Bahn (German railways) and SJ,Green Cargo (Swedish railways). Carmen Systems is a rapidly expanding organization and today has 164 employees from 24 countries. Carmen is also involved in joint research and software development activities with some of the world's leading universities. Carmen's headquarters in Göteborg has the largest R&D section in the industry.