Rostering Scheme for small airline

[Gards]

Does anyone have any info on software programs for rostering on a small scale basis? Basicly a group of pilots at my airline are tasked with trying to figure out a rostering scheme that will allow us to have a 6 week on 2 week off or perhaps an 8 weeks on 4 weeks of rotation. The company is willing to work with us on this as long as we can meet their required hours for each pilot per year.

Does anyone have adivce or direction on how I could go about figuring something like this out. Our aircraft utiliaztion is around 15 hours per day and we have about 42 pilots at the moment.

Any advice or comments are greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Gards

[silversaab]

If you want to keep costs low, there are a raft of staff rostering products you can investigate via the web, but I'd be hesitant to suggest any particular one. In any case I'd advise looking at products that are easily configured by the user, or at least without too much high-end backend development required to configure to your operational constraints (i.e. yearly/monthly/weekly/daily duty limits, crew matching, crew mismatch flags, leave requirements etc. Believe it or not, there are some rostering systems that have been developed in MS Excel that would possibly even do what you want.

There are also some useable open source programs you can look through on sourceforge, but be warned, unless you are very IT literate, you will most likely need an IT person to also look at them also, to see if one will work for you.

With any luck someone in this forum might be able to suggest something for your size of operation, but I'd be wary of getting tied in with a product that needs lots of setup time and costs and ongoing mainteneance charges if you are a small operator. If you have to spend up, get something that suits your operation's size now, with some latitude to expand over the next few years, and map out exactly what you want it to do (and/or don't need it to do) so you are clear on your ultimate objective.

Cheers

Edit: search on other rostering threads in here also

[mss piggy]

If you've only got 42 pilots it would be easier to do it manually.