Personal Bidding System (PBS)
 

Heard that introducing such a system increases the efficiency of crew planning and therefore could reduce the number of crews required.

Companies like KLM (KLC), ex-Swissair are working with this.
On the other hand e.g. Lufthansa, SAS, etc ... are not having this PBS system.

Does anybody know what really is the advantage of the PBS and how much more efficiency you can create.
And as many mainliners are not using it I wonder why not ?

SV tried this years ago because...some of the senior Saudi Captains would not show up for flights to "unpopular" destinations. Remember the 747 manager at the time mentioned that he couldn't fire them...so he might as well have a system in place so that they would fly their alloted 60 hours. Most popular destinations were LHR, MNL,and BKK. OK in summer were SEL & JFK, but not in winter...lousy weather. However the system was discontinued after about a year...don't remember why.

PBS - shall you like it?
 

One of the companies selling a PBS solution is Ad-opt, a Canadian company. They sold it up to now to the following companies:

- Air Canada
- Air Transat
- United
- Swissair (now gone into Swiss)
- Meseba Airlines
- America West
- UPS
- South African
- Fedex
- Northwest

The company claims the following on their webpage:

Quote:

"The Altitude suite of products is designed to help airlines:

Reduce planning time

Control operational costs by optimizing operations

Enhance planning performance, and above all,

Improve employee quality of life by giving crewmembers more control over their schedules
Efficiency and Cost Savings
Through the use of our Altitude system, our customers have reported significant savings in total labor and related expenses, gaining a return on their investment. This could translate into millions of dollars in savings for an airline.

Powerful Optimization
The Altitude product line is powered by GENCOL, a state of the art column generation technology - the result of over 15 years of collaborative research among four major universities in the field of advanced mathematics and operations research. Together with other robust optimization algorithms, AD OPT's GENCOL Optimizer provide significant advantages in both economic and human terms."

End of quote

Now you easily can imagine why some airlines like the PBS: it increases the productivity without having to negotiate flight duty regulations and you can "sell" it to the pilots as they can influence their lifestyle more than in the past.

Ad-opt website: http://www.ad-opt.com/

Have a nice flight

At Swissair it was introduced for flightdeck crew about 1 1/2 year ago. There was a agreement, that there is no influence of seatindex after use of the PBS (or optimizer).

At the beginn we had a lot of troubles and there are still some points to be adjusted, but for the crews, I think, it is a big improvement in lifestyle, even if I would have to work a little more I still would prefer th new system!

Just to give a clarification: The PBS is only one part, which enables the crew to bid for certain flights, stations, off-days, partners and so on. The other part is the optimizer, which is working out the best combimations of rotations.

TWA used AdOpt
 

At TWA, we used AdOpt until Dec. of last year. Most people were wild about it. I was less than enthused.

It really does reduce the number of crew members needed to run the operation. You can avoid month-end conflicts caused by sequence bidding. It can avoid training and vacation conflicts. I would imagine you can program the system to ignore certain conflicts if the contract mandates it.

You bid for your preferences using a point system. If you want a certain day off, preference that day off at 1000 points. Great if you only have one occurance. If there are more occurances, the points are multiplied by the number of occurances. Say you bid 500 points to get a certain day off. You also bid 101 points to fly a certain trip. If you get 5 of those trips, you could be working on the day you wanted off--505 points(5 x 101) outvotes 500.

I got screwed so many times in the 3-4 years of using "Pref bidding" as we called it, I lost count. My contention is that you shouldn't have to take a college level course to learn how to bid.

There was another system we tried that, although I didn't use it during the trial period, I think it was easier to understand. It took preferences in order. What you wanted most, you put first.
So simple even I could do it.

AdOpt also leaves a lot of room for mischief by unscrupulous management dicking around with the parameters. Not that I'm paranoid, though...;) TC

At KLM we use the PBS system as designed by a subsidiary of Volvo. (unbelievable, isn`t it?)
It was introduced about 5 years ago. It is very efficient for the company, it always manages to plan exactly on the limits of the regulations. For me it works fine too, because I fly shorthaul and I don`t care where I go, as long as I get my days off when I want them. And that works fine.
But it`s just as with any computersystem, you get out of it, what you put in. At KLM we put a lot of restrictions in the system, and even the smallest restriction imposed on the system causes a lower rate of allocated requests.
Having worked with both systems, I still prefer a real life person controlling my social life. That way, at least I have someone to get mad at ;)