May 12, 2000: Carmen 7 in production

Carmen 7 is now quality assured and ready to roll out. It includes important improvements in optimization, usability and data management. All Carmen products use Rave, a generic-modelling tool, which assures integration and the ability to quickly implement new business rules.

"We have expanded our ability to handle different optimization techniques transparently," says Olle Liljenzin, Product Manager, Crew Pairing. "Most important is the support for global constraints in column generation. This added Target Mastery functionality enables the user to ask the optimizer for specific results rather then doing a lot of fine-tuning and multiple runs.

The new Rule Module System allows separate compilation of rule sets. This opens up a market for "selling" generic-ready rule sets that cover a certain area. It reduces costs, speeds up time to market and gives quality assurance. I expect that we will have a number of downloadable rule modules in the Members Forum on our website soon."

"The focus has been on quality and to include a number of very useful features like the ability to copy a part of a roster from one person to another" says Peter Sutton, Product Manager, Crew Assignment. "After successful production tests with a limited number of clients, Carmen 7 also provides full support for the "maximum bid satisfaction" concept used with preferential bidding. The ongoing work to improve solution times and quality now includes the use of a reduced cost column generator and optional heuristics. This alone is reason enough for our clients to upgrade quickly!"

With Carmen's business model, based on rental agreements, which includes all upgrades, our clients are always at the forefront of our developments and never risk the situation of a forced change because of systems based on old technology or not supporting new needs. With added functionality, like support for credit cost functions with multiple guarantees, our products now also fulfill specific needs for the North American market. There are currently 40 people involved developing Carmen 8!

May 9, 2000: Spanair in production with Carmen Roster Maintenance

Paz Menendez, Product Manager at Spanair

"I am very pleased that Spanair is in production with Carmen Roster Maintenance," says Ulf Hellman, Product Manager, Carmen Crew Tracking. "This product covers an area between the publication of rosters and day of operation. It enables planners to react to changes affecting the plan, ensuring legality, cost efficiency and quality of life. I really appreciate the commitment from Spanair and their willingness to share their wide-ranging understanding of the process".

"After all the work that Spanair and Carmen have put into the Roster Maintenance project, we now have a very powerful tool to work with", says Paz Menendez, Project Manager at Spanair. "We are very proud of our teams, which have been working incredibly hard (and we'll never forget the beginning of May 2000...). Thanks to a great human effort, we achieved our common goal and we have to admit ­ Roster Maintenance has changed our lives!"

April 11, 2000: ILOG

ILOG & CARMEN SYSTEMS have signed an agreement that gives Carmen Systems access to all ILOG's technology in optimization, visualization, business rules and real-time software architecture. This will enable Carmen to develop a new generation of operational management software for airlines.

The partnership with ILOG fits seamlessly with our overall strategy to use building blocks of standard software to shorten time to market," says Ola Tiverman, Director Research & Development at Carmen Systems. "The decision was based on our excellent working relationship and ILOG's leading-edge products," he concludes.

March 15, 2000: Aeroméxico pilot union at Carmen Systems

ASPA (Asociación Sindical de Pilotos Aviadores de México) the Pilot's Union of Aeroméxico and Mexicana, spent a whole week at Carmen with Aeroméxico's management and planning staff.

The aim was to see if bringing together planning expertise and running different crew assignment scenarios with system specialists and pilots, could create a more common ground for future discussions at Aeromexico.

"The possibility of running a lot of scenarios in a short time-span, coupled with all the information needed to achieve the optimum pairings and crew assignments to balance Costs, Productivity and Quality of life, was very interesting," says Capt. Antonio Vargas. "We were very pleased with the support we received from Carmen and would like to say a special thank-you to Sami Spjuth, who spent days and nights compiling the reports."

"This turned out to be very important for Carmen," says Magnus Wennerholm, Director Business Division. "It proved that our ability to describe operation in detail and quickly run scenarios, is very important in finding a common ground for discussions. We strongly recommend other airlines to do what Aeroméxico has done."

March 1, 2000: SJ Gods awards 5-year contract to Carmen Consulting

From left: Ulf Leufstadius(Project Manager), Arne Engblad, Martin Joborn, Marianne Lidberg, Benny Nilsson, Lennart Lundström, Anders Jönsson, Andreas Brodow, Henrik Ebeling, Tomas Lidén. Sitting down: Johan Wennberg, Patrik Hilber

A five-year contract has been signed between Carmen Consulting and SJ Data regarding maintenance of the VADIS product. Ulf Leufstadius is the project manager of the VADIS development and describes the product:

- VADIS is an online optimization system that plans the distribution of empty freight cars. When a freight order is placed the system will automatically assign suitable cars and make bookings in trains, both for the loaded cars and for the empty cars in order to get them to the right place in due time. The response time of the system shall be less than 5 seconds. With VADIS we will keep track of all the 11.000 freight cars at SJ Gods and we hope for a 30% increase in capacity. The system itself consists of several modules, running in our mainframe computer, a file server and distributed workstations. The development is coming to an end during the spring 2000 and we wanted to assure a safe operation and continued development of the system in the future. Carmen's knowledge of optimization techniques and experience from large software systems is therefore of major importance. After all, the system is truly at the heart of our business.

VADIS has been built around the optimization models developed by Martin Joborn from the University at Linköping. It has interesting features such as online optimizations done every time a freight order is placed. The purpose of the system is actually to ensure that empty cars can optimally be supplied to the customers in order for the different transports to be carried out.

Carmen Consulting will take responsibility of the optimization parts but not the parts residing in the mainframe.

The development of VADIS has been going on for the last 3 years. The development model has followed RUP and Rational Rose has been used as systemisation tool. Corba and MQSeries are used for interchange between the different parts. Java is the programming language, which interfaces to CPLEX for the optimization calculations. In order to keep data persistent the object database Objectivity has been used.

Apart from the vast amount of documentation that have been produced, the system consists of about 700 Java classes and 215 000 lines of Java-code (including comments).

The system has been structured into an Information handler, a Car Planner and an Administrator Tool, which can be run separately from each other.

Erik Hasselberg, managing director of Carmen Consulting, comments:

- We regard this as a prestigious contract and are honoured to get it. The techniques used in this system are interesting and can surely influence other products that exist or will be developed by Carmen Systems and Carmen Consulting.

Tomas Lidén, Henrik Ebeling, Harald Söderlund and Erik Hasselberg

Carmen Consulting is a subsidiary to Carmen Systems, which is the leading supplier of resource planning and optimization tools to the airline industry.

February 22, 2000: Carmen Systems AB reports strong growth in 1999

Carmen Systems AB reports sales of SEK 62.5 million (44.2 m) for 1999. Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) for 1999 rose to SEK 7.6 million (5.9 m). Q4 was the company's strongest ever, with a 61% hike in sales.

"1999's results are way over expectation. We have been focusing on long term investments in R&D; and calculated that the airline industry focus on the Y2K problem would dampen growth," says Carmen's CEO, Per Norén. "The global market for transportation optimization solutions is wide open and we expect the very strong, rapid, international expansion to continue in the coming year."

February 14, 2000: Highly multi-cultural at Carmen Systems
(Article from the newspaper Dagens Industri)

Carmen Systems of Göteborg is going against the grain by recruiting foreign expertise instead of moving research abroad. There are 17 different nationalities working at the company, 13 of whom have doctorates.

"There are so many challenges at the workplace that it would be extremely difficult to find anything similar elsewhere. Besides this, the chance of becoming a part owner of the company attracts people," says Per Norén, Carmen Systems' CEO.

World leaders
Carmen Systems, the high-tech global leader in resource optimization for the aviation industry, has 80 employees, 17 of whom, or 20%, are non-Swedish. They come from near and far; 12 from Europe and others from the US, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand and Iran. 90% of those working for the company are M.Sc. and English is the corporate language. "Carmen Systems' multi-cultural facade, in other words the people, reflects the embodiment of the company," says Per Norén. 90% of Carmen's sales go abroad.

The staff are shareholders
Three years ago all employees at Carmen Systems were given the opportunity of buying shares in the company. They all took the chance, and together own a third of the company. The venture capital company Innovationskapital and Gilde Investment own a third of the company respectively. Carmen Systems, an offshoot of Volvo Data, was formed in 1994. The company has developed a computerised planning system that best optimizes, and calculates, working schedules for airline crews. "Optimizing resources and flows of manpower, timetables, machines, freight and all other factors in the aviation industry is a complicated jigsaw," he continues. "It can save airlines significant amounts of money, make transportation easier and more reliable."

Reduced costs
"Each percentage of an airline's staffing costs that we can reduce, amounts to SEK 50-100 million. The reduction for one of our clients was 11% using our system," says Per Norén. Of the world's 100 largest airlines, 13 are Carmen's clients. Most of them are European, but two are Mexican. "The company is now on its way to breaking into North America," he states.

The whole market is opening up
"We are negotiating with a number of the largest airlines in North America. When we get one of these it will open up the entire market for us," he continues. Norén also sees the potential in other transport industries. Carmen Systems already works with SJ (Swedish Railways) and one idea is that a business../subsidiary will be created for each new vertical industry.

Carmen's sales in 1999 totalled SEK 62.2 (US$ 7.3) million. The profit after net financial items was SEK 2.4 (US$ 0.3) million. This year sales are expected to reach SEK 90 (US$ 10.6) million and the long-term growth objective include SEK 800 (US$ 94.1) million by 2004.

February 4, 2000: Iberia using Carmen Crew Assignment

Iberia has taken Carmen Crew Assignment into production in next to record time. Two fleets have started to see the benefits of the product since the end of January. The rest of the long-haul and short-haul areas will be taken into production during the spring. Iberia has used Carmen´s Pairing product since the spring of 1999.

By using Carmen Crew Assignment, Iberia has discovered a more flexible system that makes it possible for planners to investigate several different scenarios.

Lars Söderqvist, Project Manager Carmen Systems, comments: "Thanks to the close co-operation with Iberia´s operations management and planners and with Iberia´s IT department, we were able to achieve production status very quickly."

January 19, 2000: Carmen Systems in a unique research project with British Airways and the Technical University of Denmark

The airline industry is seeing a growth in airspace congestion over Europe, creating evermore problems and making it increasingly hard to solve these without causing further difficulties. Management of disruption occurring on the day of operation has therefore become an important issue for airlines.

"Being able to quickly recover from operational disruption is paramount to delivering quality service to our customers. British Airways is very pleased to be involved in this project to deliver state-of-the-art decision support tools for managing any disruption to our airline operation", says Mark Lennon, Manager of Operations Control Systems at British Airways.

Descartes, the name of the research project, will lead to faster recovery, less delays, less costs for the airline, and less unnecessary flying.

"We are proud to be working with British Airways and the Technical University of Denmark in making transportation more cost effective, punctual and environmentally-friendly", says Carmen Systems' CEO, Per Norén.

The project is being partly financed by the European Commission and will run for three years. Partial deliveries are expected after one year.

December 10 1999: Paros finished - Lufthansa solves gigantic pairing problems

The EU funded research Paros project has had its final review. The project's partners were Carmen Systems, Lufthansa, Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, and the University of Patras in Greece.

The final comment from the EU project officer, Michael Arentoft was: "Given the current state of the art in optimization and IT, you have achieved the maximum result possible."

The project exceeded expectations in many ways. Lufthansa reported an increase in Crew Pairing performance of several hundred per cent. Its project representative, Lothar Föller, made a powerful statement about the planning process: "We have removed all the manual steps. We used to have daily solutions, weekly solutions, roll-outs, fix changes, and solve transition problems. All of that has now disappeared. We can now run major date problems from scratch in one go."

Lufthansa was one of Carmen's first customers, and has created its own expert team dedicated to fine-tuning Carmen's Crew Pairing system to seamlessly fit Lufthansa's ever-changing needs. Lufthansa can now solve fully-dated variable crew problems with 45,000 legs in production, a complexity and problem size hard to beat on a world-wide basis. A lot of credit is also due to the project's other partners and the Carmen project team and its project manager Curt Hjorring. They have applied complicated operations research algorithms to Lufthansa's massive pairing problems with amazing results.

December 7, 1999: Partnership with Oracle

Carmen has decided to have Oracle as its preferred database. "Oracle's market leading position and the fact that it is the database of choice amongst most of our clients were the key reasons for choosing on Oracle" says Magnus Wennerholm, Director, Business Division. The key reasons for establishing a strategic platform for data management are to increase functionality, and reduce time to market.

December 7, 1999: Platform Computing's LSF in Carmen

Carmen's in-house built batch system will be replaced by LSF from Platform Computing, a Canadian-based company founded in 1992 and focusing on Application Resource Management systems, www.platform.com By transforming the distributed computing resources into a single shared unit, LSF's components Base and Batch offer users robust load sharing and sophisticated batch scheduling. "The dynamic load balancing, and the fault tolerance are the main benefits from using LSF", says Ola Tiverman, Product Development Manager.

November 2, 1999: Annual Carmen Development Partners meeting

Development Partners (CDP), the exclusive group of Carmen clients entitled to actively participate in Carmen's product development, will hold its annual meeting in Gothenburg on December 14-15.

"CDP is one of the most important functions in our close relationship with our clients" says Magnus Wennerholm, Director, Business Division. "It not only provides Carmen with valuable development input but it is also a great opportunity for clients to exchange ideas."

November 2, 1999: Carmen in North America

North American airlines' crew scheduling management meets annually to discuss their environment, needs and product evolution. Every fifth year, the conference organizers invite vendors to participate at a Technology Fair to present their software solutions.

This year, vendors are invited to the Crew Utilization conference in Orlando, Florida and the Technology Fair will be held on Wednesday 10th November.

Carmen Systems is proud to annouce that it will be present at the conference. Per Noren, Carmen's CEO, will address the general assembly. Erik Andersson, Chief Technology Officer; Nina Visconti, Director, Pre- Sales and Gilles Gagnon VP, International Business Development, will be on hand to answer any of your questions and demonstrate Carmen's integrated Crew Planning product suite.

"The timing of this very important conference is perfect for us since we are now establishing our business in the North American market. Carmen's strategy has been to become market leader on our European home market then move into the North American market. Carmen today has the technology, service and leadership needed to be able to help North American airlines improve the solutions of their crew scheduling problems", says Carmen's President and CEO, Per Noren.

While the Technology Fair is only held on Wednesday, Carmen will have a suite open from 9th to 12th November to match the length of the conference. You are welcome to reserve a private demonstration session by e-mailing Gilles at [email protected], by telephone at (514) 956-1910 or on his cellular phone at (514) 953-4720.

We look forward to meeting you.

October 22, 1999: Carmen Systems AB reports third quarter revenues up 23%

Revenues for the third quarter grew with 23% over the same period 1998 and earnings before interest, income tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) grew with 18% to SEK 1.4 million.

Total revenue for the nine months ended September 30, 1999, increased with 21% to SEK 37.8 million, whereof 49% in product sales and 51% in services.

The operation has continued to increase and staff size reached 67 people during the third quarter.

October 14, 1999: Carmen Systems awarded at ETRE conference

Carmen Systems AB of Gothenburg, Sweden, has been awarded the prestigious Best of European Tech Tour 1998-99, a distinction awarded to a select band of eight companies in Sweden, Ireland and Switzerland. Carmen Systems is introduced at the ETRE conference in Monaco which is attended by the leading players in the IT industry.

In the citation for the award, European Tech Tour (ETT) states that all of the eight companies "have outstanding technology and are well positioned for continued high growth".

Carmen Systems is a world-leading developer and supplier of resource optimization systems. The company specializes in applications for the transport industry. Clients include Lufthansa, British Airways, SAS and Aeroméxico. A strong and loyal client base added to expected global expansion for resource optimization systems, within other segments, means that Carmen Systems predicts significant growth over the next five years.

"This award is additional proof of the importance of resource optimization. It also shows that Carmen Systems has a unique method for meeting an area of sharply increasing demand. The presentation at the ETRE meeting will provide a very special opportunity to provide information about ourselves to a very important target group," says Per Norén, Carmen Systems' CEO.

ETT is an independent organization that seeks to improve contacts between Europe's high tech companies while supporting the development of innovative European companies within the high tech sector. The organization regularly arranges tours that enable on-site studies of high-growth businesses in selected countries. No fewer than 400 companies made applications to ETT prior to the recently concluded tour of Sweden, Ireland and Switzerland. Only 80 of these were accepted. Carmen Systems was selected as one of the eight most exciting companies.

The European Roundtable Exhibition, ETRE, was formed in 1990 as the first forum in Europe where business leaders from the global IT industry could come together and share ideas, acquire financing, and make deals.

September 6, 1999: SJ (Swedish Railways) selects Carmen Crew Assignment

SJ and Carmen have signed an agreement covering the implementation of Carmen Crew Assignment and Carmen Preferential Bidding for scheduling train crews. In a first phase Carmen will model and adapt the system for two business areas, implementing new work time models and planning processes.

Jolanta Drott, Project Manager at SJ, today described the latest co-operation project with Carmen Systems AB: "The European railway system is in the middle of a revolution. New customer requirements, deregulation and new technology are factors requiring dramatic changes to be made. By introducing Carmen Pairing last year, SJ made its current planning procedures more efficient and schedules less resource demanding. We want to continue re-engineering the planning process itself, thereby creating possibilities for strategic analysis and bringing planning closer to the day of operation. By doing this we will be able to adapt more easily to changes in demand and crew preferences. By implementing Carmen Crew Assignment and Preferential Bidding we will make this adaptation possible".