Swiss International Air Lines (SWISS) has been working under a broader strategic partnership to use Google Cloud technology to develop a platform that facilitates the planning and steering of the airline’s daily flight operations. The new platform will help the teams working in SWISS’s Operations Control at Zurich Airport to consistently make the best decisions on the airline’s complex and highly dynamic flight operations all over the globe. The platform collates data from the various units and processes within the company such as passenger itineraries, aircraft assignments, crew rostering and aircraft maintenance, which the system can then use to propose the optimum scenarios for keeping its flight operations as stable and efficient as possible.
“As The Airline of Switzerland, we want to offer our customers punctual and reliable flight operations,” explains SWISS Chief Executive Officer Dieter Vranckx. “And our partnership with Google Cloud plays a decisive part in enabling us to maintain stable flight schedules. Google Cloud helps us further reduce our carbon dioxide emissions, by allowing us to deploy our aircraft more efficiently. So alongside our investments in other new technologies such as sustainable aviation fuel, we aim – through this project – to promote innovation in Switzerland in the operational planning field, and to further confirm our pioneering credentials.”
Hans Thalbauer, Managing Director, Supply Chain & Logistics Solutions at Google Cloud complements: "Through this partnership, we have a significant opportunity to innovate the future of airline operations and to contribute to making them more sustainable. We’re bringing the best of SWISS, Lufthansa Group and Google Cloud together to solve some of the airlines’ biggest challenges and positively impact the travel experience of millions of passengers that fly with SWISS annually.”
Better steering of aircraft performance and individual connection times
By bundling relevant information on Google Cloud, SWISS can utilize dynamic parameters, such as passenger and cargo demand or individual aircraft performance, to better plan which type of aircraft will be most efficient for a particular route. The resulting fuel savings also help reduce SWISS’s carbon dioxide emissions. The data collated can further be used to steer and predict travellers’ individual connecting times at SWISS’s Zurich Airport hub. In the event of an irregularity, the system will swiftly propose a range of alternative scenarios to still get the customers affected to their desired destinations as punctually and comfortably as possible. Should a departure be delayed owing to snowfall, for instance, to the extent that a passenger travelling on it will no longer be able to make their intended Zurich connection, the system will promptly offer a range of efficient rebooking options via all the relevant hubs throughout the Lufthansa Group.
SWISS is the first airline in the Lufthansa Group to collaborate with Google Cloud under the group’s strategic partnership with the cloud provider. The platform concerned has been specifically devised and developed to enable its adoption by further Lufthansa Group carriers.
