Southwest Airlines uses ILOG Software to Dramatically Change the way it Schedules Crews

Technology Enhancements to Further Increase Performance and Speed of Crew Scheduling Systems

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - June 11, 2001 - ILOG (NASDAQ: ILOG; Nouveau March? France; SICOVAM: 006673) today announced that Southwest Airlines (NYSE: LUV) has selected ILOG's powerful optimization and business rule software components to increase performance and speed of the airline's crew scheduling systems. Using ILOG Parallel CPLEX optimization software, Southwest has significantly decreased the time required to generate ideal crew schedules to service its 2,700 daily flights nationwide.

A more efficient crew scheduling system lets Southwest consider unpredictable business changes and make necessary adjustments to crew schedules. This leads to improved on-time performance and more accommodating schedules for Southwest's crews, resulting in better customer service.

Complex Crew Scheduling Requires Sophisticated Tools
When creating schedules, Southwest must consider more than 15,000 scheduling constraints, such as FAA rules and regulations, Federal Aviation Regulation (FAR) contractual provisions like scheduling policies and practices, Southwest's own "quality-of-life" standards, and home-base locations of crew members. In addition, with 2,700 daily flights, approximately 3,000 pilots and 6,000 flight attendants, Southwest is faced with 750,000 crew duties -- or variables -- that must be evaluated. Overall, a typical weekly schedule must consider nearly two million variables and more than 90,000 constraints.

Previously, Southwest used ILOG CPLEX optimization software, which includes sophisticated mathematical algorithms designed to solve complex business problems. Upgrading to ILOG Parallel CPLEX, Southwest can now break up its complex scheduling problem into smaller pieces and run ILOG CPLEX on four central processing units (CPUs) instead of one. This has enhanced the airline's ability to create a daily crew schedule from between 36 and 48 hours to about seven to 10 hours. Before any optimization techniques were employed at Southwest, an employee would use paper and pencil and take four to six weeks to figure out a monthly crew schedule.

"Southwest is committed to employee satisfaction and customer service, and we look for technologies that help us achieve that objective," said Rusty Burlingame, systems engineer at Southwest. "By using ILOG optimization engines, we're able to create schedules that have our crews staying closer to home, while being gone fewer days, and spending less time idle in airports."

Business Rules for Business People
The ILOG JRules business rules software component lets Southwest eliminate the need to dedicate precious technology resources to make changes in code to its crew scheduling system caused by changes in internal and external operating rules and regulations. ILOG JRules employs a straightforward, simple business rule language that is easily customizable, easing initial application development as well as enabling non-technical personnel to quickly update any business rule. With ILOG JRules, no changes in the application are required when business rules change.

Source: ILOG

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