Delta to Use Carmen's Crew Planning

Delta Air Lines and its low-fare service, Song, will use Carmen System's crew planning application to help manage the scheduling of their more than 22,000 crew members.

The Delta package includes Carmen's crew pairing and crew rostering functionalities.

According to Carmen, its Crew Pairing can help operations' managers optimize their crew resources by rapidly testing different scenarios, while controlling important cost variables such as hotel rooms, per diem expenses, and "deadheading" travel.  They can also be used to limit the need for crew changes, and better distribute pilots and flight attendants among crew bases, or create multibase pairings.

Crew Rostering allows managers to optimize their rosters automatically, or done interactively, Carmen says.  When accomplished automatically, many complex details of crew schedule construction, including training requirements, qualification considerations and verification, and language constraints are easily analyzed and considered.  When done interactively, personal rule exceptions for a crew member can be introduced, but must be explicitly verified by the planner.

Carmen's rostering application allows the planner to introduce other controls into the optimization, if desired, as well.  For example, the user can allocate additional buffers to minimum rest, reduce overtime costs, more equitably distribute attractive layovers, and assign cabin crews with special language skills to specific flights.  11-11-2004.