RosterBuilder - An Architecture for an Integrated Airline Rostering Framework

Rostering is a crucial planning process in an airline’s overall scheduling hierarchy. Besides addressing the issues of crew utilisation and crew costs (which represent two of the major expenses in running an airline), a rostering tool must also cover the question of quality requirements. The quality of service can be improved by having the rostering tool take into consideration the skills of individual flight attendants during the rostering process. The quality of work life that an individual employee enjoys depends on his or her ability to participate in the rostering process. To an extent, this participation involves the employee's ability to determine his or her own work schedule, which in turn also impacts his or her job performance. Timely and ubiquitous access to rostering information therefore represents a crucial benefit for employees, as it enables them to not only query data on schedules, but also to submit their preferences at all times and in any place. In this paper, we present the architecture for RosterBuilder, a sample framework for flexible rostering at airlines and show how RosterBuilder can be integrated into modern computing and communication environments. We focus on deriving functional requirements that apply to most airlines using a rostering concept and specify those requirements in use case diagrams that follow the UML formalism. Our analysis considers the user groups that are involved: crew members, crew assigners and crew operators. Considering the need for flexibility, scalability and ubiquitous access to information, we propose a component-based system architecture that is easily customisable and adaptable to end users' needs. We present and describe the integration of rostering algorithms as the core models and the interfaces to additional modules, which include support functions applied when generating rosters and mobile information access for crew members. We conclude by presenting the design for the proposed modular architecture.