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 find the most efficient roster combinations manually. Good optimization can create room for improvement. This can be used to reduce the total costs, increase stability, increase the roster quality or reduce time-to-market.

So far, the average initial saving is about 4%. Substantially greater savings can be made by changing 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.

The crew would like to have greater influence over their rosters. How can I still guarantee efficiency?
You can perform an initial planning scenario without any crew preferences. This will provide a baseline for crew costs and solution stability that the following optimization sessions with crew preferences must respect. It is possible for an individual client to define exactly what cost increase or stability decrease is acceptable in order to receive an even higher ratio of granted crew bids. It is often feasible to raise crew satisfaction while maintaining costs and stability levels.

For senior crew the strict order must remain. Is it possible to award bids differently for junior crew?
You can use different assignment principles for various crew groups. For crew members with many service years the assignment of bids can remain very strict. For crew members with very few years of service it is possible to let seniority have an impact, but not be totally dominant.

We use bidlines, but plan to move to individual preferences for one crew category. Can the two models work together?
Carmen Crew Rostering contains functionality for bidlines as well as for individual rostering. Both models can be managed in the same system. A small grop of of the entire crew community can evaluate preferential bidding and it is even possible to mix bid models within the same crew group. For example, by allowing the most junior crew members to move to preferential bidding, while the more senior crew members stay with bidlines.

Can I receive feedback from the day-of-operation process to make the planning more robust?
Yes, it is possible to load a solution from day of operation and display it with the originally published roster to analyze what actually happened.

Can I use Carmen Crew Rostering to achieve a more precise forecast?
With Carmen Crew Rostering you can 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.