Airline Turns to a 'Bus' for Real-Time Messaging

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May 02, 2007

Airline Turns to a 'Bus' for Real-Time Messaging

Running an airline requires a lot of synchronization between a lot of systems, and if you're operating a fleet of 300 airplanes making 1,000 flights a day, you have to make sure everything is airtight. What is each flight costing in terms of fuel consumption and salaries? What repairs are needed? When is the next round of scheduled maintenance? What happens when flights are delayed due to weather?

Batch was okay in its day, but doesn't cut it anymore. To better stay on top of these matters, Scandinavian Airlines International (SAS) has embarked on a year-long project to move its operations from home-grown mainframe applications to three new distributed systems that provide real-time messaging. A new report in ComputerWorld states that the airline is employing SOA via an enterprise service bus (ESB) as a messaging backbone. The ESB will serve as an intermediate layer of middleware that lets the company map data from disparate systems, route messages, ensure that services are delivered in the correct order and enforce security rules.

Jonas Berggren, vice president of production systems at SAS Group, estimates that the migration project will lower IT maintenance costs by $250,000 per month after it goes live -- a potential savings of $3 million a year.

"Every time a plane takes off or lands, that event in the form of a message is sent to multiple systems, including internal systems that monitor maintenance, and to partner and supplier systems," Berggren said. In addition, the data is used by another internal system to calculate the costs of specific flights. Those messages will flow through the ESB and automatically update all of the systems using services in real time as opposed to the batch updating used by the airline up until now.

Retraining end users who have been using the mainframe applications over the past decade will the most challenging part of the migration at SAS, Berggren said.

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Comments

Two colleagues and I have written a case on another (US-based) airline's event bus deployment, complex event processing and event stream processing, and the use of real-time (BAM) alerts. This was done in their operations area for multiple applications; generating significant savings and, more importantly, maintaining compliance with ever-changing FAA regulations. All this was done using only operations (non-IT) personnel. While the case itself is now several years old, it still is "state of the art." The official case hasn't been published; feel free to email me (rwelke@gsu.edu) and I'll send you a pre-publication copy.

Posted by: Richard Welke at May 8, 2007 05:29 PM

Please If you can send me the pre-publication copy.

Best regards

Posted by: jp aubert at June 6, 2007 10:27 AM