Southwest Airlines serves 100 million customers annually with more than 3,900 daily departures during peak travel season across a network of 101 destinations in the United States and eight additional countries.
The Baker, as it is referred to by Southwest Airlines, is the airline industry’s first real-time, integrated recovery solver that generates solutions to operational disruptions such as maintenance problems and weather events, while minimising the impact to passengers and flight and ground crews.
Since its implementation in November 2015, Baker has yielded significant cost savings by demonstrating considerable improvement in key metrics such as on-time performance (OTP), customers delayed more than two hours, and mishandled luggage. On days with irregular operations in which more than 2% of flights were cancelled, OTP was 10-15% higher than similar events in the past – equating to more than 2% increase in OTP since the tool was launched in November 2015. During a blizzard in Denver last year, for instance, OTP was 7% higher than a comparable airline that did not take proactive action.
“Prior to the Baker implementation, superintendents of dispatch would address airline problems with a manual, labour-intensive process that could take hours to work out a single solution,” comments Phil Beck, manager, optimisation solutions at Southwest. “Not only does this tool enable them to quickly react to problems within minutes, but they can also get ahead of potential disruptions hours in advance and have time to evaluate multiple scenarios. This project has supported the company’s goals and philosophies related to passenger hospitality, cost avoidance and operational performance.”
Using the FICO Xpress Optimization Suite, the Baker utilises several algorithms, advanced in-memory cache technology, and hundreds of carefully calibrated parameters to achieve real-time performance and high-quality, integrated decision-making. The Baker team worked closely with Southwest’s superintendents of dispatch for years prior to launch, incorporating business knowledge and best practices gained from their decades of first-hand experience.
FICO is a pioneer in the use of predictive analytics and data science to improve operational decisions. The solution has been awarded the 2016 FICO Decisions Award in the Decision Management Innovation category.