How Southwest Airlines created schedule reliability against disruptions
If airline schedules are optimized solely for profitability, it may negatively impact a schedule’s reliability and operational metrics, which are difficult to measure before flying the schedule. Southwest Airlines, one of the largest airlines in the world, creates flight schedules months in advance.
It wanted to develop a software solution to predict schedule reliability and operational KPIs with high accuracy during the planning phase. Southwest also needed to identify and adjust critical flights that affect overall reliability and on-time performance in the network.
The solution
Since airline operations are prone to irregularities and disruptions, it can expose a planned flight schedule to operational risks and uncertainties. To address this problem, we developed SkySYM, a simulation-guided optimization system, to assess the on-time performance of a flight schedule before it’s flown and to improve its reliability by making schedule changes, without impacting profitability.
We worked closely with Southwest’s network planning and network operations departments to understand and model its business operations. We built a digital twin of Southwest’s operations using discrete event simulation and modeled all important operations, such as flight delays, maintenance disruptions, weather, crew and passenger movements, airport congestion, and schedule recovery of deviations and disruptions.
The solution
As a long time user of HaulPlan, Saia knew their way around the system when the unexpected struck. While purpose-built for linehaul planning and optimization, Optym’s technology enabled Saia to maintain advanced agility, which easily transferred over as an emergency planning tool.
Saia took advantage of various optimization modes, which allowed for studies for diverting shipments from one terminal to another specific terminal, selecting the next best terminal in hub skip mode. As terminals would quickly need to be dropped from the network, Saia was able to quickly adjust.
The solution
As a long time user of HaulPlan, Saia knew their way around the system when the unexpected struck. While purpose-built for linehaul planning and optimization, Optym’s technology enabled Saia to maintain advanced agility, which easily transferred over as an emergency planning tool.
Saia took advantage of various optimization modes, which allowed for studies for diverting shipments from one terminal to another specific terminal, selecting the next best terminal in hub skip mode. As terminals would quickly need to be dropped from the network, Saia was able to quickly adjust.
Results
SkySYM has become the standard system used by Southwest’s network planning and network operations departments to analyze and improve schedules for operational performance before publishing them. Southwest uses SkySYM’s predictive analytics and optimization capabilities to understand a schedule’s operational performance and potential bottlenecks and to improve schedule reliability. Our studies showed that SkySYM could improve on-time performance by up to 5% without impacting profitability, saving the airline tens of millions of dollars in operational costs annually.
Results
HaulPlan allows carriers to thrive in the face of uncertainty, showcasing the effectiveness of technology in mitigating the impact of external disruptions.
With HaulPlan in place, Saia successfully prepared for an unexpected event and navigated the challenges brought about by COVID-19 in a way that best served employees and customers.
“HaulPlan has empowered our planners to easily see the network impact of our decisions, design temporary weather or COVID impacted alternatives, and seamlessly push our changes into our execution system, saving us and our customers time and money,”
Jeff Owen
Vice President of Linehaul Operations
Developing SkySYM to simulate the operation of our highly complex, point-to-point route network was no simple task.
With SkySYM, we will better understand the impact that different network designs have on our operational performance. We are very pleased with the dedication, expertise and commitment that Optym displayed at every step of this journey, and with the results we are seeing."
Jeff Borges
Senior Manager of Operational Performance
Using advanced machine learning, we modeled airline processes and validated them against historical data, achieving 98% accuracy for critical KPIs. We developed new techniques to identify problem areas, including flights that cause critical delays in the network. We adjusted flight times and aircraft rotations to improve schedule reliability without compromising profitability. SkySYM combines our simulation and optimization algorithms with an advanced decision support system, where users can define data inputs, prepare scenarios, run simulations and view schedules using intuitive visualization tools.