Deployment Planning for Pilots and Cabin Crew
Edelweiss Air’s existing crew planning tool showed weaknesses in performance, was sometimes complicated to use, and led to error-prone processes. The airline now uses a powerful cloud solution based on Microsoft Azure with an attractive interface based on the latest web technologies. As a basis for the new crew page, 1stQuad used the in-house architecture concept “Cloud Transformation Blueprint”.
Edelweiss Air AG
Edelweiss Air is a Swiss leisure airline that is 100% owned by Swiss International Air Lines and is, therefore, part of the Lufthansa Group. It operates flights from its base at Zurich Airport to European and intercontinental destinations.
The Swiss airline Edelweiss Air relies on a clever software solution for planning the operations of its approximately 300 pilots and 700 cabin crew members. From the first day of each month, the assignments are planned for the following month and made available to employees via the intranet.
In addition, the planning software manages all changes in deployment in the event of delayed flights or sick employees. To ensure that everything runs smoothly, a very complex set of rules must be observed. There are, for example, binding regulations on the number of permitted flying hours, the required rest time between flights, so-called off-days per time period, and other deployment parameters.
The planning of regular in-flight pilot training is also part of the software’s functional scope: during in-flight training, one pilot tests the second pilot and takes the exam. Here too, the devil lies in the detail: if the planned examiner is not available, his replacement must also be authorized to conduct the exam. In the previous version of the software solution, comments were used for this purpose – an error-prone process. An additional weakness was the performance: response times of up to 30 seconds are not adequate in the hectic everyday life of an airline.
Powerful cloud solution with Microsoft Azure
1stQuad, therefore, developed a powerful new solution for Edelweiss Air from the end of 2017 until autumn 2018 based on the in-house Cloud Transformation Blueprint, with numerous detail improvements such as a swap duty function for whole crews. The new software solution “Crew Page” is now completely based on Microsoft Azure. The surrounding systems and microservices are synchronized via a service bus. The back end uses .Net Core, the web application for the front end was implemented as a single-page application with React.
The first step was to introduce the new software solution for the resource planners, followed by the “Crew Page” for the employees by mid-2019.
