“Garage-O-Mizer”ing An Airline Schedule
Saturday, August 12th, 2006
Have you ever thought how difficult it is for airlines to create their daily flight schedules? I never thought about it until a very good friend and college roommate, Alex started working at Southwest Airlines. One of his jobs is working with a team to create Southwest’s daily system wide flight schedule.
It is amazing how complex it is to create flight schedules that meet customers needs and maximize efficiency. Mind you this is a very simplistic, high-level view description, but look at it this way, airlines need mathematicians and programming experts to solve such complex scenarios.
A colleague of my friend wrote this post on Southwest Airlines blog about how Alex created an optimized schedule for Southwest once thought to be “mathematically and technologically impossibleâ€. Oh, and did I mention he did it on his own time on his home PC? Thus it was monikered the “Garage-O-Mizer”.
“He had cracked the problem on his own and produced the solution himself, over Christmas break, on his home PC—metaphorically, in his garage. He had done what was actually thought to be mathematically and technologically impossible at the time. THE “GARAGE-O-MIZER†WAS BORN!”
Yes… I’m bragging about my friend and I’m happy to do it. Even though he cracked this problem a couple of years ago, it’s fun to see part of the story being told today in a public forum. Kudo’s Alex!
A Vancouver photographer Kris Krug, who regularly posts his work on his Flickr photo sharing 
