Do more with less, Air Traffic Control Planning (vídeo)
Air Traffic Control Planning Sosftware
CODICE is not just a resource planning tool, but the key to maximizing efficiency and adjusting costs. If you want a presentation of our products and services, give us the following information here.
CODICE is not only a public transport planning tool and now also the planning of electric vehicles, but the key to maximising efficiency and adjusting costs. CODICE:
- What do I have to do?
- What do I need to do it?
- How should I go about it?
- Who is going to do it?
- When I have to do it?
CODICE Air Traffic Control for all
CODICE AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL is a state-of-the-art computer system for the optimal management and planning of associated human and technical resources that ideally solves the planning of air traffic controllers in air navigation service providers CODICE ATC, allows to ensure optimal coverage of control needs, complying with the complex labor regulations that apply in the air navigation sector.
Automation and Optimization
The three fundamental elements of any planning scenario are: activity, the room needs to be covered, the air traffic controllers and the rules that prevail in planning.
CODICE gives the planner the freedom to define the room needs for each period of time. In addition, it is an open system that allows defining for each work center which are the profiles on which to define the needs, and in this way the system can be used both in control centers and in single-position towers.
Optimal planning for real people
Cost reduction is a critical objective in all organisations and in general in public transport planning. However, schedules must be assigned to people. CODICE’s optimization engine makes it possible to reconcile these two seemingly opposite worlds, obtaining highly efficient planning while taking into account the well-being and preferences of employees.
Simplicity to align the planner with the objectives of the company
CODICE brings the planner closer to the quality indicators that really matter, providing the key analyzes updated in real time. As important aspects of planning as being sure that all the service is assigned, being sure that you are complying with labor regulations and being aware of the productivity of the planning.
Agile edits
Not all the casuistry that can be presented can be covered by automation, for this reason CODICE makes available to the planner powerful tools to be able to manually modify the planning. These tools greatly facilitate the work of the planner by guiding him according to the circumstances towards the best decision. Thus, for example, the system can suggest the best candidate to receive overtime, it allows to exchange shifts with a click or to recover previous shifts of a resource by eliminating a planned absence period.
Find out how CODICE improves each planning phase
Identify the optimal amount of resources you will need to meet long-term forecast demand
- Make realistic demand forecasts by applying standard rules to flight forecasts for the next season
- Identify the necessary resources to cover the expected demand, complying with current legislation
- Prepare the budgets for your organization from the necessary resources, both material and human
- Analyze through scenarios the impact on your operations in the event of possible eventualities such as the provision of service to new clients, modifications of labor legislation, or staff reductions
Plan your workforce within weeks of its entry into operation
- Update your demand forecasts
- Applying standard rules to the updated flight plan
- Considering the shifts to plan that do not depend on flights
- Defining directly the number and type of resources required by time slot using histograms
- Identifying the training required for each type of activity
- Adjust the rules for your workforce, defining, if they exist, the peculiarities of each worker
- Plan training, vacations and known absences
- Create optimal high-efficiency quadrants while respecting employee preferences
- Get the real cost of your planning and compare with the budget
Cover last minute drops or unforeseen demand swings before trading begins.
- Discriminate delays, absences or other relevant events that require the attention of the planner
- Select the best candidate to cover an absence from a list of employees generated by the system
- Approve shift change requests
- Continuously check coverage and the most important indicators (KPIs)
- Rely on automatic restriction verification
Exploit the information once the operation is complete
- Compare attendance record with planning
- Generate the payroll factors
- Analyze historical data using powerful cubes
What modules CODICE has for public transport planning
The system has a series of functionalities that allow the user to easily calculate the workload that must be assigned to cover the predefined flight times correctly. These tools have been designed with the flexibility of the framework so that they can be easily modeled according to the needs of each company.
Manage scheduled flights
Allows the user to perform the following tasks:
- Import scheduled flights from an external database or from an excel sheet.
- Manage imported flights.
- Get reports of scheduled flights
The user can import the flight schedule for a day, a week or for a period to be defined in the system, whenever he wishes.
Workload calculation
Allows the user to perform the following tasks:
- Manage standards of engagement
- Transform flights into activity to be assigned using the commitment standards.
- Manage the activity built in the previous step.
The flexibility of the framework allows us to configure the rules of engagement according to the requirements of each company. The implementation of the engagement standards is highly configurable and does not limit the possible attributes. Standards of engagement could also consider formulas, arrival profiles, or apply weights to a given standard of engagement or to ensure the priority that this particular rule is applied during a planning process.
The following images represent an example of engagement standards:
Taking into account the scheduled flights and the active rules, the system automatically generates the workload (resources, demand), that is, the number and type of tasks that have to be scheduled.
This functionality can be used for both staff and equipment. If we use these rules for the personnel we will get the workload of the resources, if we use rules for the GSE, we will get the workload of the material.
It is important to note that the calculation is performed automatically, that is: the user does not have to do anything to obtain the workload. It is a very flexible mechanism, the user can modify parameters in the flights or in the rules and automatically see the impact it has on the workload.
Once the flight schedule has been imported and the commitment rules have been applied to generate the activity, the optimization engine can calculate the workload, that is the optimal number and type of shifts to cover the activity.
The objective of the optimization engine in the dimensioning module is to calculate the optimal shift plan. The shift plan is the number of shifts needed to cover the workload of a day. Optimization generally reduces the number of shifts to the minimum necessary, but other criteria can be introduced such as the balance between the different types of shifts (Breaks with rest, for example) or the use of overtime.
In the dimensioning module there are two types of constraints:
- Skills. – Restrictions that tell the system which resources can be allocated to which tasks
- Shift. – Restrictions include all agreements on maximum working time and minimum rest time.
Optimization is done using optimization criteria. The most common are the criteria for maximizing productivity, that is, calculating the shifts with which a minimum number of hours will be paid to cover the activity. However, other optimization criteria can be added after detailed analysis with the planning team, for example:
- Use of overtime on shifts. These hours have an extra cost; this extra cost gets higher productivity.
- Cross-use. If allowed, we could introduce cross-use criteria in shifts, such as ‘distributing skill changes across shifts”.
- Allow discovered
The result of the automatic calculation of a day is a schedule of shifts, that is, a set of shifts, each belonging to the type of shift allowed, that cover optimally the activity.
The system offers the following shift indicators:
- Working hours. Format hh:mm.
- Hours of rest. Format hh: mm.
- Hours of homework. Format hh: mm.
- Productivity (hours of task divided by hours of work). As a percentage, to two decimal places.
- Inactive (usable) hours. Format hh: mm.
The system allows adding new indicators to adapt to the needs of each company.
The roster includes all the functionalities to optimally generate the resource calendars, that is: it optimally assigns the shifts to the staff so that they cover the activity.
The roster module includes a calculation engine that can automatically assign shifts to people according to different criteria, taking into account current legislation.
Staff
The system allows to store as many personnel as necessary. For each resource, as many properties as the company needs can be stored. The system allows you to define as many specific personnel properties as necessary.
All resource properties can be stored on a time basis, that is, taking into account that the value of a property associated with a resource can change its value over time.
Activity to be planned
The activity to plan in the roster depends on which approach we choose.
- Two steps. In this approach, the user has previously used the dimensioning module to calculate which shifts have to be assigned each day. the activity to be planned in the roster is then the set of shifts calculated in the Sizing Module.
- One step In this approach, it is not necessary to pre-calculate the shifts with the Dimensioning Module because the system allows calculating shifts and at the same time assigning them to the staff. In this case, the activity to be planned in the roster is the workload calculated in the Activity Generation Module.
The two-step approach is correct when the staff is homogeneous and the activity does not change, so “day types” can be defined. If the staff is heterogeneous, for example there are groups with different agreements or different training, or if the activity is variable, for example, charter flights, then the one-step approach is better, since it is capable of reacting to daily changes .
Restrictions
Constraints are conditions that must be met in the calculation of a solution. In case of optimal construction of quadrants, we refer to the working regulations that establish how to assign work to employees legally in a specific period.
The system will take into account several types of restrictions, for example:
- Minimum rest between shifts.
- Free days restrictions. In this case the system can work in two different ways:
- By patterns.
- By flexible quadrant, which means that the system is given the freedom to determine where to allocate days off based on a series of rules.
- Qualifications: The system can control which employees have the appropriate training for each task according to their characteristics and depending on the special needs of each task / shift. If an employee has more than one training, cross-use is activated.
- Availability (pre-assigned activities). Users can enter future availabilities for employees (mandatory breaks, absences, training, vacations, sick leave) for automatic calculation to take into account during planning.
- Boundary conditions – the roster for one period must be aligned with the end of the quadrant for the previous period.
- Shift restrictions
Criterias
The optimization criteria set out the conditions to be achieved in the quadrant construction process. The flexibility of the system makes it possible to define, together with the planning team, which criteria should be taken into account and with which priority. Examples of optimization criteria are:
- Quadrant costs
- Coverage
- Employee preferences
- Ergonomic criteria
- Equity
The system provides a screen to the user to view and manage the employee calendar planning. This screen is the quadrant:
The quadrant display includes additional displays that provide extra information.
Assignment viewer. The assignment viewer provides the user with a table of information about the requirements calculated in the planning module and that must be assigned each day, indicating whether or not they are assigned to an employee, indicating which employee. The system alerts the user if a service has to be assigned on a day that it is not assigned.
Thanks to this viewer, the user can be aware, at all times, of the problems in the assignment of the service of one or several days.
Assignment detail viewer. Provide the user with information in the quadrant in a list. The user can view the details of the selected zone or of selected days. At the same time, you can organize, filter and export the displayed information in other formats.
Detail viewer
Coverage. This viewer provides a comparison between the activity calculated in the calculation of necessary resources and the personnel available at all times, in this way the planner can quickly assess when there are overcoverages or undercoverages.
Verification of restrictions. This viewer provides an online verification of all the rules, every time a user manually introduces a change in the schedule that goes against a rule, the system displays a warning.< />
In addition to automatic calculation, the system provides tools to update the quadrant. These tools can be:
- Tools to manually modify the employee quadrant. Examples of manual changes:
- Allocation of vacations (vacations, days off, etc.).
- Delete a free.
- Assignment / deallocation of a shift / task.
- Shift swapping.
- Write a comment in a cell.
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Tools to update the activity. The user updates the flight plan with last minute changes. The system automatically recalculates the activity with the updated flight plan and shows the user if there are gaps in the quadrant.
All manual modifications of the quadrant automatically refresh the account times and all the displays such as coverage or restriction verification.
The system can manage the different employee time accounts online; This management is done with the accountants. Counters are a system of elements that posts employee assignments to provide the user with additional information about employee schedules. Some examples of counters are:
- number of vacation days in a given period
- number of sick leave
- number of days off
- number of training days
- number of hours worked
- number of overtime
- …
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A road passenger transport company must control that the means it uses for transport, basically vehicles and drivers, are up to date in compliance with the legislation regarding the different licenses or permits that they must have, such as the driver’s license or periodic technical inspections that vehicles must pass.
The module for license management is a module that allows planners to have a clear management of the different licenses that each employee and each vehicle must have according to their characteristics.
Through this module, the planner can create the different licenses that each driver and / or vehicle must control and assign them to each driver and / or vehicle, indicating in each case the validity dates of the license. The system will be in charge of notifying the planners in advance about the licenses that are about to expire so that the planner can initiate the pertinent steps for the renewal.
This module works in a coordinated way with the module for the assignment and monitoring of the service.
When a vehicle / driver license is about to expire, depending on the number of days in advance, the system issues an alert and informs users of the details of the license about to expire.
The module for assigning vacation periods allows automating the process of assigning the vacation period to employees, ensuring that at all times there are no more staff on vacation than indicated.
This module makes it possible to integrate the planning information obtained with CODICE with the operating aid system. This integration operates on two levels:
- Service integration. It allows the transfer of the service calculated with CODICE for a certain period of time to the operating aid system.