News & Events

As the year is drawing to a close we thought we would give an overview of our developments and how we have grown as a company over the past year.  As a brief reminder Motulus were formed by Benjamin, Wim and Przemek 8 years ago, they quickly built a team of experts in advanced mathematics and software development and have been providing optimization consultancy and products since, with particular focus on solving resource planning challenges in the aviation industry.

To meet the additional demand and interest in our solutions, as well as supporting our plans to develop our products further we have been recruiting.  We continue to grow with 4 new joiners this year.  Yannick and Sebastian have joined to help our optimization and development team.  Linda will provide us with some much needed support on the HR and Accounting front, and most recently Mirka has joined us as Technical Programme Manager.  Mirka also extends our bases from Antwerp and London to Budapest.

You can find a full list of our team here; and if you, or anyone you know, are passionate about aviation and optimization, and would like to join a team that enjoys solving problems where others have failed then please reach out to us.

With more focus this year on taking our solutions to a wider market we have been traveling.  Firstly we joined the excellent Sustainable Aero Lab programme.  Not only did this see us travel to Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin and Hamburg but more importantly enabled us to participate in a programme of events that brought together dynamic growing business dedicated to sustainability in aviation with a team of experienced mentors who were able to share their expertise.  We found the experience invaluable and would recommend it.

In addition to visiting the Paris Air Show (which we did courtesy of our support from FIT) we also attended the World Aviation Festivals (Singapore and Lisbon), the Dubai Airshow and most recently the Aircraft IT conference at LHR.  All of these were excellent, well run and gave us a number of opportunities to talk to airlines and experts across the industry about the challenges today, and how we could help of course!   We also had a representative at the AGIFORS crew and scheduling conference in Santiago Chile.

We plan to travel further in 2024 so hopefully we’ll see you on the road (or in the air)

Our Crew Scheduling and Network Optimization products continued to mature and further develop.  A significant new feature release in our Crew Scheduling solution was Flex Assignment: a pre-assignment tool that allows schedulers to identify precise pre-assignment duties that are creating pinch points in rosters.  This adds more value to a product that has a number of pioneering features such as the integration of pairing and rostering into one optimization run, dynamic standby planning and dynamic fatigue calculations.

We have refreshed our analytics capability this year.  We are moving to a model that empowers our customers to be able to use the data and KPI’s created by optimization runs more flexibly and easily.  Our new Analytics engine can integrate with the BI tools of the airlines’ choice, it also will have the ability to feed flown rosters back in to allow more sophisticated analysis.

In the world of Crew Planning we are also moving forward with our Crew Bidding portal development;  we see Crew Engagement as the next critical step forward in the development of crew planning technology.  At present we are developing our mobile bidding app to utilize our powerful optimization technology, our roadmap though has plans to utilize AI to enhance crew members’ ability to place and evaluate bids.   The human side of crew roster production from a crew member and planners perspective is something we reflected on earlier in the year: there are links to these articles here: crew planners view and crew members view.  Reach out to us if you’d like to learn more or contribute to our thinking in this area.

Last, but definitely not least, we launched a new product in 2023: tail assignment.  Our solution allocates aircraft to flights over a long or short time window, taking into account all operational constraints and trying to drive down operating and fuel costs at the same time.  We have already carried out a very interesting PoC that has identified some potentially significant savings.  We published a series of articles discussing tail assignment on our website earlier in the year; if you are interested they can be found here.

We are a developmental and tech intensive organization: we will continue to develop our solutions in innovative ways, as well as look for more pioneering ways to bring optimization to aviation challenges.  If you have an area that you think we could help with then please let us know.

Our customer base has grown this year which has presented our optimisation team with some really interesting challenges that they have relished tackling.   We continue to have a number of very interesting discussions elsewhere which hope to reveal more in the new year.

We have been working hard on developing a methodology to support and value airlines across the whole crew planning ecosystem.  We are exploring partnerships with a number of other vendors to provide complementary products across the crew planning cycle. This would give airlines the opportunity to achieve best of breed whilst maintaining low cost integration and simple account management.  Although the option will always remain to seek optimization support from Motulus through just our existing products to tackle resource planning challenges.

We have also joined the Yocova marketplace providing us with opportunities to connect further across the aviation industry

Finally, to sign off, we have thoroughly enjoyed our conversations with you all in 2023: learning more and more about the industry challenges, and developing our solutions further.

We hope you all have a great New Year and look forward to connecting further in 2024.

To reach us please visit our website, look us up on LinkedIn or send us an email at contact@motulus.aero

Photo by Roven Images on Unsplash