Bombardier Flexjet Boosts Efficiency of Flight Operations

The Problem

Bombardier Flexjet is a fractional ownership aircraft company with high fixed capital costs and operating expenses. Flexjet and its competitors operate, in effect, an airline with no fixed schedules; customers are guaranteed 24-hour access to an aircraft on short notice. Customers also can request to be flown anywhere in the world with as little as 48 hours' notice and often do. Maintaining the capacity to deliver on these promises, while minimizing idle time for costly equipment and personnel, was proving to be too big a task for the company after its fleet grew from 25 jets to 80 over a four-year period.

The Analytics Solution

Flexjet contracted for the creation of a new, powerful analytics-based scheduling software application with three basic components. The first two establish crew annual leave and basic monthly schedules. The third, called TOSCA, does the heavy lifting in the complex and detailed short-term scheduling arena, enabling Flexjet to operate efficiently even as it grew rapidly. At the heart of these system components is an analytical tool called GENCOL, which uses resource variables and constraints to model the various rules governing aircraft itineraries and crew members' schedules. GENCOL employs a column-generation approach to decompose large-scale mixed-integer nonlinear programming problems. The system both schedules crews and assigns flights to particular aircraft looking ahead one to three days into the future. TOSCA factors both “hard” constraints (such as Federal Aviation Administration and Flexjet rules, and aircraft performance limits) as well as “soft” factors, based on cost trade-offs.

The Value

After full implementation over a three-year period, Flexjet realized a 20% reduction in crew members per aircraft and a 40% reduction in core fleet-support aircraft, while live (owner-carrying) flight hours per available aircraft per day increased by more than 10%. During the same period, the percentage of flights executed flawlessly remained consistently high.