Manage all flight and crew operations with our unified flight operations solutions
As air traffic continues to surge, seamlessly managing airline fleet and crew is becoming more complex and challenging. A large number of predictable and unpredictable environmental factors impact flight operations, and airlines cannot afford to mishandle the disruptions. Irregular operations not only impact the airline’s revenue and on-time performance, but also customer experiences.
In response to these challenges, airlines are continuously striving to make use of the latest technologies to develop a total flight operations system that drives operational excellence, productivity, and profitability. Operations management is the nerve center of airline operations and is crucial for any airline, as it has a direct impact on customer experience. By adopting a innovative flight operations platform, an airline’s Integrated Operations Center (IOC) can more effectively manage day-to-day operations, as well as control the magnitude, scope, and impact of disruptions and unforeseen issues.
Wipro’s TOPS Airline Operations platform enables companies to meet their diverse business and regulatory requirements with its suite of flight operations solutions. As a total flight operations system, it addresses operational complexities with real-time information and situational-based alerts to minimize disruptions and improve resource utilization.
TOPS is a web-based integrated solution suite designed to plan, monitor, anticipate, and manage an airline’s (and airline groups’) end-to-end flight and crew operations to achieve maximum efficiency and profitability while ensuring safety. It provides an efficient interface engine to integrate with various data sources, ensuring the availability of accurate information for collaborative decision-making. TOPS also provides real-time statistics and situational alerts to improve utilization and productivity, and it mitigates errors to improve on-time performance and reduce direct operating costs.
TOPS provides truly a one-stop ops management solution for the mission-critical division of any airline’s Operations Control Center (OCC), Systems Operations Center (SOC), and Integrated Operations Center (IOC). With TOPS, the OCC business user just needs to log into a web-based application from any device and perform all critical business processes, including flight schedule (SSIM) reviews, tail assignments, and flight operations and scenario planning (for disruption events) in a single platform.
TOPS seamlessly integrates critical data from different systems (passenger/crew/cargo/flight movement timing/maintenance events), thereby providing the user with a real-time view of flight operations at any given time.
The Cost Model within TOPS can help airline users make excellent cost-effective decisions on flights with high visibility of EU261 compensation costs and costs due to different flight events, such as cancellations and diversions.
The TOPS Workspace Manager (Scenario Planning tool) helps business users easily work out a cost-effective solution to any type of disruption event with complete visibility of the actual flight schedule.
TOPS OPS integrates all phases of operations: fleet planning, scheduling, disruption management, and recovery. It delivers comprehensive, real-time, and dynamic ops management information (including revenue, cost, and situational awareness information) on flights, aircraft position, weather, notices to airmen (NOTAMS), crew connections, passenger transfers, etc. to proactively manage the impact of irregular operations using a tailor-made “what-if” tool.
TOPS Flight Watch is a proactive flight-tracking tool that displays the exact position of the aircrafts or flights superimposed over a map of the region. As a component of our total flight operations system, this tool provides a visual display of issues, enabling the IOC to make better decisions and instantly establish communication with the operating crew.
TOPS Benefits
- Support for complex airline models: The TOPS flight operations solutions can easily support single or multiple aircraft base networks.
- Global coverage: Airlines in any country can implement TOPS to modernize their operations and gain new efficiencies.
- EUROCONTROL integration: TOPS has the capability to integrate with EUROCONTROL (specific to the U.K. and Europe), thereby enabling high visibility of the departure sequence of flights at airports that use Airport Collaborative Decision Making (ACDM) processes.
- TOPS Flight Watch: This module follows the ICAO Mandate 4D/15 for tracking 4D, which covers latitude, longitude, altitude, and time. It also provides ADS-B message integration capabilities with Flight Radar and FlightAware.
- Efficient spare aircraft visibility across the airline network: An airline can identify spare aircrafts across its network (at different airport locations or bases) and TOPS uses this data during the tail assignment process, thereby providing a more optimized solution.
- FAA integration: TOPS can integrate with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) system to obtain Expect Departure Clearance Time (ECDT) updates, allowing high visibility of flight departure sequences.
- Support for highly configurable rule engines: Airlines can easily set up a vast set of business rules that govern flight operations.
- Complete visibility of EU261 (U.K./Europe) and other flight event–related costs: OCCs can improve their decision-making while working out plans in response to large or small disruptions.
- Visibility of broker of record (BOR) costs (compensation and overbooking costs): Airlines that operate across the U.S. can gain deeper insights into their BOR businesses expenses.
- Comprehensive data administration module: With this feature, airlines can efficiently store and maintain complete aircraft, airport, and Operational Constraint Reference information.
- Workspace Manager: This efficient scenario-planning tool helps OCC users work out numerous solutions in a test mode before determining the most effective solution.
- A user-friendly user experience: Business teams receive a seamless experience, enabling them to quickly adopt our ops management solution and gain benefits quickly.
TOPS OPS Key Modules
Slot Management
- Airline users can easily define different slot rules that need to be considered between themselves and the airport slot coordinator.
- Users can define the type of slot response and message to be triggered based on the flight events (Diversion/Flight Return/Return to Ramp, Create Positioner Flight).
- The Slot Dashboard View provides end-to-end visibility on the slot communication between the airport coordinator and the airline user.
Aircraft Movement Control
- Real-time situational awareness of a flight and the assigned aircraft at different stages of the flight operation can allow for improved scheduling and quality customer experiences.
- A powerful alerting capability proactively informs the business user in case of any deviation from the flight schedule in terms of varying severity.
- The integration and prioritization of different flight movement sources enables airlines to record the most relevant flight movement timings (MVT, ACARS, ACDM, EUROCONTROL, FAA, etc.).
- Our effective scenario-planning tool, Workspace Manager, allows airline users to determine the most up-to-date and cost-effective solution in Playground mode.
- Our cost model enables full visibility of EU261/BOR compensation costs along with flight event–related costs during different flight events.
Flight Watch
- The Flight-Tracking module provides situational awareness of en route flights over a rich map view and follows the 4D/15-ICAO mandate.
- The module supports a range of effective rules based on weather conditions at the airport, enabling business users to make effective decisions on the day of operation.
- It provides a feature-rich overlaying tool that enables users to overlay different types of layers (airport data, weather data, other airline data, etc.) onto the map for better decision making.
Tail Assignment Optimizer
- The Tail Assignment Optimizer tool allows the Planning team to easily assign flights to the best and most suitable aircraft in timely manner.
- The TOPS TA module enables users to define a set of various conditions to be followed to ensure high coverage of flight assignments.
- Users can make data-driven assignments based on the maintenance of spare aircraft at different locations, maintenance events, subfleet information, and onward ID data.
- Different business rules will determine if a flight is allowed to operate on a specific aircraft type to a specific destination.
- Users can evaluate tail assignments in Scenario mode (through the TOPS Scenario Planning tool) and make further changes before publishing the final output to the live system.
