Air Canada has employed over 75 AI experts since 2018 to develop in-house solutions for optimizing flight schedules and maintenance planning, enhancing efficiency and customer experience.
Did you know Air Canada employs over 75 employees across the fields of data science and operations research, machine learning and data engineering? You might think it’s strange that an airline employs so many experts in a domain as relatively new as artificial intelligence. But there’s a very good reason for all the effort.
Since November 2018, Air Canada has actively been building AI solutions in-house, primarily driven by the lack of off-the-shelf solutions on the market that meet the airline’s requirements.
Some of the AI solutions being developed at Air Canada include tools to optimize our flying schedule and one to improve 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. 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,” said Keith Dugas, Director Operations AI at Air Canada.
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 2-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.
Another two of the 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 assisting a cross-functional team in identifying opportunities to simplify our 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.
“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.