Hitit and Gurobi Join Forces to Transform Airline Crew Leave Planning Through Advanced Optimization Technology
Gurobi Optimization, LLC, a global leader in decision intelligence and mathematical optimization technology, has announced that its industry-leading solver is now powering Hitit’s next-generation crew management solution. Hitit, one of the world’s foremost providers of airline and travel IT systems, has integrated Gurobi’s optimization capabilities into its innovative Crane Crew Leave Optimizer, enabling airlines to streamline one of the most complex and time-consuming workforce planning processes in the aviation industry: crew leave scheduling.
The collaboration between Hitit and Gurobi is already delivering significant improvements to airlines worldwide, dramatically reducing planning time, increasing operational efficiency, and enhancing the overall employee experience for flight crews. As airlines continue to navigate operational challenges, labor regulations, and workforce expectations, advanced optimization solutions such as this have become essential tools for maintaining competitiveness and operational resilience.
A Data-Driven Approach to a Complex Operational Challenge
Airline crew leave planning is an extremely intricate process that involves balancing an extensive array of constraints. Airlines must design leave schedules that not only satisfy regulatory and operational requirements, but also account for business rules, crew seniority systems, labor agreements, and the individual preferences of thousands of pilots and cabin crew members. These plans must ensure that crews remain well-rested, compliant with safety standards, and available to operate the airline’s flight schedule without disruption.
Traditionally, this process has been performed manually or with limited automation. As a result, planning teams often face inefficiencies, errors, and lengthy timelines—sometimes taking several weeks to generate a single leave plan. With so many interdependent variables, manual planning frequently leads to suboptimal results, lower crew satisfaction, and an increased risk of compliance issues.
Hitit designed the Crane Crew Leave Optimizer to solve these long-standing industry problems by providing airlines with a fast, accurate, and fair way to generate comprehensive leave schedules at scale. The inclusion of Gurobi’s mathematical optimization solver inside the system has raised the tool’s capabilities even further, enabling airlines to adopt a state-of-the-art planning solution capable of delivering results within seconds.
How the Crane Crew Leave Optimizer Works
The Crane Crew Leave Optimizer is a specialized sub-module within Hitit’s broader Crane Crew platform, a sophisticated suite of applications designed to support all aspects of crew management and crew operations. Using advanced optimization algorithms, the Leave Optimizer rapidly analyzes thousands of interconnected constraints and produces leave schedules that meet both operational needs and crew expectations.
Some of the key capabilities include:
1. Automated Consideration of Crew Rules and Regulations
The system incorporates all relevant crew rules—such as seniority-based bidding systems, contractual obligations, minimum rest rules, monthly duty limits, and national labor regulations.
2. Support for Crew Preferences and Fair Allocation
Crew members can submit their leave requests through a mobile application, which communicates their preferences directly into the system. The optimization model ensures that preferences are considered in a fair and transparent manner, increasing crew satisfaction.
3. Rapid Computation at Large Scale
Thanks to Gurobi’s high-performance solver, the system can generate optimal or near-optimal leave schedules in a matter of seconds, even for airlines managing several thousand crew members.
4. Dynamic Adjustment to Operational Needs
Airlines can modify parameters such as staffing requirements, demand patterns, or seasonal changes, and the model will instantly recalculate schedules while maintaining compliance.
By combining operational requirements with individual crew preferences, the tool delivers optimized schedules that strike the ideal balance between efficiency, fairness, and practicality.
Airlines Experience Transformational Improvements
Since implementing the Crane Crew Leave Optimizer, Hitit’s partner airlines have reported remarkable improvements across several operational areas:
• Major Reductions in Planning Time
Tasks that previously required weeks of manual work can now be completed in seconds. This drastic reduction in planning time enables airlines to allocate resources more effectively and respond quickly to operational changes or disruptions.
• Increased Employee Satisfaction
With a transparent and optimized leave allocation process, crew members feel that their preferences are more fairly considered. This leads to higher morale, stronger trust in the system, and better long-term retention.
• Improved Operational Reliability
Optimized leave schedules ensure that adequate staffing levels are available throughout the year, reducing the risk of flight disruptions caused by crew shortages.
• Enhanced Compliance and Reduced Risk
Automation removes the guesswork from rule compliance, ensuring that leave allocations align with regulatory standards and internal labor policies.
These benefits demonstrate the real operational impact of integrating advanced optimization technology into airline planning systems.
Leadership Perspectives on the Collaboration
Hitit’s Chief Executive Officer, Nevra Onursal Karaağaç, emphasized the transformative effect of advanced optimization technology on airline crew planning. She explained that integrating Gurobi’s solver into the Crane Crew platform has enabled Hitit to provide airlines with a scalable and data-driven approach to a traditionally burdensome task.
By integrating Gurobi’s industry-leading solver into our planning system, we have been able to tackle the complexity of leave planning with a data-driven, scalable approach—transforming a manual, error-prone task into a fast and fair optimization process,” she said. “These advancements have been made possible through Hitit’s collaboration with Gurobi.
Her remarks underscore the strategic importance of leveraging mathematical optimization to address the aviation sector’s growing operational challenges.
Gurobi’s CEO, Duke Perrucci, highlighted the critical importance of crew members in the overall functioning of an airline, emphasizing that their welfare and satisfaction directly affect performance and service quality.
Crew members play an essential role in every airline’s success. Planning annual leave periods in a way that not only maximizes efficiency, but also crew satisfaction, is critical,” Perrucci said. “By leveraging mathematical optimization, Hitit creates plans that deliver tangible value for both airlines and their employees.
This perspective reflects the shared vision between Hitit and Gurobi: to provide airlines with innovative and reliable tools that support both operational reliability and employee wellbeing.
The Increasing Importance of Optimization in Aviation
The aviation industry faces mounting pressures—including fluctuating travel demand, labor shortages, complex regulatory environments, and heightened expectations for reliability and service quality. These pressures have pushed airlines to adopt more sophisticated technology solutions to improve efficiency and competitiveness.
Advanced optimization tools are becoming especially important in workforce management, where decisions regarding crew assignments, rest planning, leave scheduling, and staffing forecasts have direct impacts on safety, cost efficiency, and employee satisfaction.
As a result, solutions like Hitit’s Crane Crew Leave Optimizer—which blends deep operational knowledge with powerful mathematical optimization—are emerging as essential components of modern airline operations.
A Partnership Shaping the Future of Airline Workforce Planning
The collaboration between Hitit and Gurobi illustrates the growing trend toward integrating AI-driven optimization technology into core aviation systems. By combining Hitit’s specialized expertise in airline IT solutions with Gurobi’s advanced solver technology, the two companies have created a powerful platform that brings new levels of speed, accuracy, and fairness to crew leave planning.
With airlines increasingly focused on digital transformation, workforce resilience, and operational excellence, this partnership represents a major step forward in redefining how airlines plan, manage, and support their crew members.
The ongoing adoption of the Crane Crew Leave Optimizer across global airlines reflects strong industry confidence in the solution’s ability to deliver measurable improvements. As more airlines embrace optimization technology to enhance their operations, the innovations driven by companies like Hitit and Gurobi will continue to play a central role in shaping the future of aviation.
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