The Magellan Crew Control Product

Magellan is an Airline Crew Management system with special emphasis on tracking the crewing situation in real time up to and including the day of operation. Sophisticated monitoring and repair tools empower the crew controller to stay on top of a rapidly changing operational situation. The system enforces all required legal constraints to ensure that government and industrial regulations are followed.

The system was designed around a three-tiered architecture using an SQL RDBMS, a middle tier Application Server utilizing a Blackboard toolkit written in Lisp/CLOS, and thin User Interface Clients written in C++. The various layers communicate via standard CORBA interfaces.

After an evaluation of commercial CORBA implementations did not produce a satisfactory result, ILU was chosen as Magellan's ORB. Because the application server is written in Lisp a CORBA mapping to Lisp was vital for the project. Joachim assisted the ILU team at Xerox/PARC in upgrading ILU's Lisp support to the latest kernel version, and ported it to the Franz Allegro 3.0 (later also 5.0) platform on Windows NT.

Because of his domain knowledge and extensive experience with requirements analysis he has been involved in the requirements definition for Magellan from the start, and participates in the design of the overall architecture.

An initial release of Magellan for marketing purposes was completed in 1998. Installation at British Airways Regional is currently under way.