Air Canada has ramped up in-house development of artificial intelligence (AI).
With a shortage of market-ready tools that meet its operational needs, Air Canada said it decided to move into AI on its own and develop tools to optimize flight scheduling and enhance maintenance planning.
“Air Canada’s maintenance scheduling assistant was created out of a need to plan maintenance schedules far in advance with ever changing variables to consider,” said Keith Dugas, Director Operations AI at Air Canada. “The current industry leading AI enabled technology allows airlines to plan their maintenance up to 30 days in advance, whereas the newest AI application that we are building in-house will allow for two years of continuously updated planning,”
An On-time Performance Schedule Optimizer tool was successfully launched last month and is being used by Air Canada’s Network Planning team, which is the team responsible for determining where the airline flies and for building an appropriate schedule. This solution uses simulations and machine learning to evaluate a potential network schedule, predicting at a high and low level its expected on-time-performance (OTP). The tool will highlight stress points from a given schedule, which will allow for pre-emptive action in either a change in the schedule months before it operates, a change in the aircraft rotation, or a change in the operational execution, resulting in improved overall on-time performance.
“Building this OTP tool from scratch has been an incredible, two-year journey of innovation, great collaboration between IT, Commercial and Operations teams, and a commitment to improving our OTP, and hence improving the overall experience of our customers” said Pascale Batchoun, Director Schedule Integrity.
Other projects in development aim to make the lives of contact centre and customer relations teams easier by providing enhanced guidance on how to handle incoming customer queries, and also assisting a cross-functional team in identifying opportunities to simplify existing policies and procedures.
Working closely with employees across the company during the design and build phase using in a human-centred approach, these solutions enable employees to be more effective in their day-to-day tasks, officials said.
“Since 2018, we have built a world class team of AI experts tapping into both Montreal’s and Toronto’s wealth of AI talent. By having this capability within the company, we are able to deliver projects that are of vital importance to Air Canada and will benefit our customers in numerous ways as we leverage these technologies to find efficiencies in our operations,” said Bruce Stamm, Managing Director, Enterprise Data and AI At Air Canada.