The 34th IPP Symposium
Applying Optimization in the Transportation Industry: Experiences from Carmen Systems and Some Personal Thoughts
Stefan E. Karisch, Carmen Systems
What does it take to successfully apply optimization and build a company around it? I will try to answer this and related questions in my presentation and use Carmen Systems as an example. Carmen develops and implements resource management and optimization solutions for demanding transportation operations. Clients include five of the ten largest airlines in the world, namely Air France, British Airways, Delta Air Lines, Lufthansa, Northwest Airlines and Deutsche Bahn (German Railways), one of the largest passenger transportation companies in the world.
The company was founded in 1994 in Gothenburg, Sweden, and has today 285 employees worldwide. The foundation of the company was however laid in the late 1980s when systems specialists at Volvo Data and researchers at Chalmers University of Technology came together to design a system that would plan schedules for aircrew at Scandinavian Airlines. I will give an overview of the early years and initial challenges and summarize some of our more recent work in optimization and how it has been successfully applied in Carmen Systems' product.
