The Crew and fleet Optimization Workshop (COW) has been held annually since 2001. This year, the workshop was held virtually over four days with presentations from many different parts of the wider Boeing organisation. Waldemar Kocjan, Senior Optimization Expert at Jeppesen, and member of the COW Organising Committee, reports:
- COW is one of the 'vehicles' we use within Boeing for bringing together researchers in the fields of optimization and analytics. The event allows for us to present and discuss ongoing research and development initiatives across business domains. We not only explore synergies but also provide inspiration that feeds into further innovation for our customers. Many ground-breaking innovations, now used world-wide by our customer-base, were presented early on and vetted during a COW event.
- This year, the program contained presentations on quantum computing, recovery optimization for ops control, optimization techniques for crew training, improvements in crew transport search, as well as several presentations on improving optimization algorithms. Relevant for this newsletter, an on-going research initiative was also presented, using large-scale optimization and analytics for quantifying the effectiveness of regulatory flight and duty time limits - including the new EASA FTLs.
- The presentations will not be made public at this point, but our customers will get to see the outcome of COW in terms of faster optimization runs and improved solution quality. COW gives the entire research community at Boeing an annual kick of energy, and I'm proud to be part of arranging it.
Are you curious about the complexities involved in crew planning optimization, and the 'combinatorial explosion' making it 'NP-hard' to solve? Please read this interview with Professor Dag Wedelin from Chalmers University, part of our 30-year anniversary article series.
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