Flight Plan

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Solving for X: Once the FAA clears the way for the Eclipse 500, Iacobucci will get to see how good his models really are.

 

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  Round-trip options for a business trip with three days' advance notice.

Meanwhile, to build the optimizer, Iacobucci recruited his pair of Russian rocket scientists: Alex Khmelnitsky and Eugene Taits, mathematical wizards he'd hired once before at Citrix. Rather than tackle every scheduling contingency via brute-force computing, the not-Russians cheated by slicing and dicing them into more manageable chunks. They used opaque mathematical techniques such as heuristics and algebraic multigrids, which elegantly subdivide a sprawling problem like this one into discrete patches that can be solved (within limits) simultaneously.

Ironically, the more they slaved over the problem, the less it seemed that throwing a perfect bull's-eye every time was the key to their salvation. The speed of their solutions was proving to be more crucial. If they could provide DayJet with a minute-to-minute snapshot of near- perfect solutions, the system could essentially run the company for them. DayJet would become faster--both in the air and operationally--than any of its competitors could ever hope to be.

"Total soccer" replaced brute-force attacks on goal with continuous ball movement, says modeling expert Jim Herriot. "In some sense, we're teaching DayJet how to play total soccer."

With one team working on modeling demand and the other calculating baroque flight plans, Iacobucci and his engineers then concocted a third software system called the Virtual Operation Center. The VOC runs the company in silicon, feeding the phantom customers inside the ABM into the optimizer, which does its best to meet each of their demands with optimal efficiency and maximum gain. Seen on-screen, the VOC is a time-lapse photograph of DayJet's daily operations, also drawing upon maintenance and real-time weather information to produce a final data feed that factors in nearly every facet of the business. Iacobucci compares each run of the VOC with a game of baseball in which the ABM is continually pitching to the optimizer; DayJet has already played several thousand lifetimes' worth of seasons.

Armed with its real-time operating system, DayJet is pursuing a very different idea of optimality than, say, the airlines. With their decades of expertise in the dark arts of yield management, the airlines know exactly how to squeeze every last dollar out of their seats, which is indeed pretty optimal. But they also lack an effective plan B--let alone a plan C or D--in the event that the weather intervenes and schedules collapse. In fact, while, say, JetBlue may now finally have a contingency plan or two, DayJet's business model is nothing but contingency plans.

Herriot offers another sports metaphor: "Total soccer," popularized by the Dutch in the 1970s, replaced brute-force attacks to the goal with continuous ball movement. "Moving straight to the goal is an excellent way to score, except for one slight problem--the other team," Herriot says. "They're a human version of Murphy's Law. In total soccer, you continually place the ball in a position with not the straightest but the greatest number of ways to reach the goal, the richest set of pathways."

"Each individual pathway may have a lower possibility of reaching the goal than a straight shot," Sawhill chimes in, "but the combinatorial multiplicity overwhelms the other team." The Dutch discovered that a better strategy was a series of good, seamlessly connected solutions rather than a single brittle one.

"The Dutch won a lot of games that way," Herriot adds. "It also created a different kind of player, a more agile, intelligent one. In some sense, we're teaching DayJet how to play total soccer."

In complexity lingo, a chart of all the pathways those Dutch teams exploited would be called a "fitness landscape," a sort of topographical map of every theoretical solution in which the best are visualized as peaks and the worst as deep valleys. "We're dealing with a problem where the problem specification itself is changing as you go along," Sawhill says. "You no longer want to find the best solution--you want to be living in a space of good solutions, so when the problem changes, you're still there." Fluidity is the greater goal than perfection.

To that end, the company has been changing the problem inside its simulators every day for the past four and a half years, looking for those broad mesas of good solutions. And after a million or so spins of the VOC, DayJet has produced a clear vision of the total market and its likely place in it. Iacobucci expects to siphon off somewhere between 1% and 1.5% of all regional business trips within DayJet's markets by 2008, with "regional trips" defined as being between 100 and 500 miles. In the southeast states the company initially has its eye on, that's 500,000 to 750,000 trips a year, out of a total of 52 million, more than 80% of which are currently traversed by car. Yes, DayJet's life-or-death competition is Florida's SUV dealerships, not the airlines. DayJet may even help the airlines slightly: The model predicts some customers who fly DayJet one way will take a commercial flight back home.