The Design And Realization Of An Air Crew Scheduling Systems Based On OSGI Technology

Big airline companies operate many air routes.Airline pilots are valuable human resources of airline companies.How to efficiently schedule their air routes and rationally use human resources to realize cost optimization is one of the main challenging tasks for airline companies.Air crew scheduling system can generate optimized scheduling and efficient route planning to achieve optimal full life cycle scheduling management of pilots and as well as efficient flight control and adjustment.At present,the crew rostering systems adopted by most of the Chinese airline companies are foreign products.Chinese airlines companies are in disadvantageous positions during commercial competition in terms of both overhead cost and independent intellectual property rights.It is therefore an urgent priority for many Chinese airline companies to develop air crew scheduling systems with their own independent intellectual property rights.The Open Services Gateway Protocol(Open Service Gateway Initiative,OSGI)is a JAVA-based service specification established by the OSGI Alliance.The middleware-based OSGI provides software developers with a service-oriented,component-based software development environment as well as a standard method for software lifecycle management.Therefore,the OSGI based systems have many attracting features such as low complexity,reusablity,dynamic deployment and sustainable operability.This paper contains some of the research work carried out during the implementation of a big project aiming to completely independently develop an air crew scheduling systems based on OSGI technology for a big Chinese airline company.It consists of three main parts.The first part describes the framework of J2EE technology,the main principles of OSGI technology and the RCP technology for interface development.The second part deals with the structure of the airline crew rostering system and the main scope of work.The third part of the paper focuses on the realization and implementation of the specific modules.