[DLarsen]

About a decade ago, I was part of a startup trying to disrupt crew scheduling. It's a non-trivial operations problem when you aim to honor crew preferences, union-negotiated affordances, FAA legalities, etc. We were only involved in the pre-planned schedules. At that time, the airlines we were courting had entirely different human-hravybsystem to resolve real time issues. There was some level of reserve redundancy baked in so the human planners had some wiggle room to work with... but redundancy is expensive to maintain. As a relatively new engineer at the time it was a pretty neat domain with big $$$ at stake. As it turns out, pretty much nobody wanted to take the risk on a new system even if it had provably better schedules for all parties. All it takes is one snafu for the whole thing to turn into a major regret.

[nlstitch]

So your biggest challenge was stakeholder management or expectation management at that startup? Did you eventually go to market and succeed?

[DLarsen]

We ran a pilot with one carrier for a subset of their crew for maybe a year, but eventually failed to gain further traction. Very tough sales and implementation cycle in spite of the fact that we could convince many individuals (bothe crew and management with their competing concerns) of the benefits of our system.

[kilroy123]

Interesting. My last job was doing something similar but much more ambitious.

Manage the entire fleet. All tails, flight legs, and crew.

It was for a much smaller US airline but still a household name.

The crew aren't union so that helped. But it was tricky to manage the crew part.

[nlstitch]

Im actually working at a startup that wants to use an algorithm to plan transport on large scale. ( Different Industry though). Got any tips or insights on biggest challenges?