Plato Project with KLM

Plato (PLAnning TOgether) is a planning tool for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. It keeps track of the rosters (assignments of flights to crew members) for 7000+ cabin crew members. KLM's assignment department uses the system for both the initial assignments, and to manage changes on the day of operation. The system includes a sophisticated Rule System to ensure that no illegal assignments are made. This requires checking of numerous government, union, and commercial rules and regulations. Plato has been in operational use at KLM since March 31, 1996.

When the project started Joachim concentrated on the design of the core Scheduling Module of the cabin crew scheduling system that Mercury (formerly Softouch) built for KLM's cabin crew department. Later he also took on team leader and project management roles.

Every Plato end user has a dedicated workstation, an X-Terminal, the Plato back-end processes run on IBM AIX RS/6000 servers, including the central Oracle RDBMS which runs on a symmetric multiprocessor system. At Mercury the system was implemented on the Hewlett Packard PA-RISC HPUX platform, and then ported to the customer's IBM AIX target platform. In addition to numerous contributions to the overall design of the system Joachim designed and implemented the Scheduling Engine, the Flight Database access module, and the client-server interfaces for Plato.