IFS Announces Tail Planning Solution for Airline Industry

Enterprise applications company, IFS today announced a new software tool for the civil aviation industry for flight planning and maintenance.

Called the IFS Tail Planning, Optimization & Assignment, the tool maximizes aircraft allocation efficiency, supports aircraft planning and optimally schedules maintenance events, a company statement said.

The software provides full visibility and dynamic optimization within a single solution, well in advance of planned flight tasking and maintenance events. Planners can now handle a wider planning window and dynamically manage hard and soft constraints that affect aircraft scheduling, such as destination or maintenance requirements, and analyze the impact of these events on the flight schedule.

Maintenance engineers now benefit from full visibility, ahead of planned maintenance events and available aircraft ground times.

Airlines further benefit from access controls, dynamic role-based workflow management, and master data management for constraints while taking into account service level agreements (SLAs).

“The solution maximizes fuel savings by reducing maintenance inefficiency through better allocation of aircraft to long-haul routes and assigning an aircraft for maintenance, within the maintenance window,” said Graham Grose, industry director for Aerospace & Defense at IFS.

“The solution will play a key role in helping airlines achieve business goals and grow even further in what is an extremely competitive market,” he added.

At the IFS World Conference in Gothenburg, the company gave a presentation on how a similar tool had helped the Dubai-based Emirates Airlines achieve increased fleet optimisation by deploying an earlier IFS tool.