I understand how Crew Pairing can reduce costs by producing effective pairings, but how can Crew Rostering save more money?
With a complex agreement structure and additional quality and stability criteria it is very hard to manually find the most efficient roster combinations. Good optimization can create room for improvement. This can be used to reduce the total costs, increase stability, increase the roster quality or increase the service level.

So far, the average initial saving is about 4%. Substantially greater savings can be achieved if it is possible to change the process to take full advantage of the flexibility and predictability that Carmen Crew Rostering brings. This can be achieved by trading agreement changes for increased crew influence or by increasing the flexibility by publishing free day patterns, duty periods and the detailed flight numbers at different times.

Our crew would like to have greater influence over their rosters. How can we be sure that this isn’t too expensive?
Carmen Crew Rostering can support both crew requests, fairness or any mix of the different systems. It is not allowed to increase the total cost or reduce the overall stability of the solution to grant more requests. It is, however, possible for an individual client to define exactly what potential cost increase or stability decrease that is acceptable to receive an even higher ratio of granted crew requests.

How do you guarantee that senior crew receive more requests than junior crew?
Each crew member rates the importance of their requests individually. After this a roster is created where each crew member is treated as being the most senior person. This will result in a dream roster for each crew member.

Based on seniority or on earlier granted crew requests, each crew member is assigned a target for how closely the actual roster shall match the dream roster. When creating the final solution the objective is to grant as many requests as possible, but a crew member will never miss the target to allowanother crew member to exceed his/her target. Since all crew requests have been rated individually the system can create different combinations to get as many people as possible above their targets.

The consequence of this system is that a greater part of the crew community will receive more granted requests, while senior crew members still will be able to control their roster in detail.

Can I receive feedback from the day of operation process to make the planning more robust?
Yes, it is possible to input a solution from day of operation and display it with the originally published roster to analyze what actually happened to the original plan. It is also possible to produce statistics reports that compare the difference between what really happened and what was planned.

Can I use Carmen Crew Rostering to achieve a more precise forecast?
The most common way to forecast is to use key performance indicators. However, using key figures will never capture all details in the exact distribution of pre-assigned activities, training individual constraints, duty hour distribution, etc. The forecast will improve as more details are considered. With Carmen Crew Rostering it is possible to plan any period, using both real production pairings, approximate standard pairings or even dummy duties. This makes it possible to carry out preliminary planning for long periods to achieve a better understanding of how the available resources match the coming needs.

The Process Specification and Options Basic Functionality Questions & Answers Screendumps Product Sheet (pdf)

If you have any questions about Carmen Crew Rostering, please contact us at [email protected]

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