Fleet Fantastic – Sebastien Roy, CEO, Lean Systems – Increasing Efficiency and Productivity for Transportation Fleet Management Through the Use of Artificial Intelligence

Sebastien Roy is the CEO of Lean Systems. He is an experienced operation research developer with a wealth of embedded systems experience. Lean Systems is an optimization platform that enables fleet managers to increase overall productivity with a schedule and routes solver solution. Lean Systems' solver can schedule large fleets in the optimum way to produce efficiency and increase savings, and it can do this in only a few minutes at a cost that is scalable. And their platform can easily be integrated into any current information system.

Lean Systems' work involves the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to many problems that transportation companies face, such as pilot training, crew training, and more. Roy explains as fleets grow, so do the potential cracks in their training procedures. Resources and people get shuffled around and efficiency and quality can be compromised. With AI automation, Roy states tasks that once may have taken several days, such as scheduling for a fleet, can be done in a significantly shorter block of time. AI can consider multiple options, stops, destinations, etc. at once, which leads to faster, and better, scheduling, with greater compliance to crew preferences.

Roy details how one problem in the scheduling chain can create a domino effect of problems down the line, such as when a particular flight is cancelled or delayed and how that impacts crew and possible alternatives, etc. at the cancelled flight's destination points. Roy states that their platform can produce results that allow for an actual decrease in fleet size with an increase in efficiency and productivity of the fleet overall, as the AI can more easily address last minute problems with weather and maintenance.

The transportation efficiency expert addresses the traditional problems with fleet scheduling for the road and in the air. One issue that is perennially problematic is the scheduling of regulated maintenance, as maintenance schedules are mandated according to the number of actual flight hours of an aircraft. The problem loop exists as fleet managers need to book flights in order to know when an aircraft will need to go into maintenance but must consider maintenance schedules before booking flights.

Roy's company's platform allows fleet managers to use AI to run preemptive maintenance scheduling and thus decrease the hours needed for planning while increasing fleet efficiency. Overall, transportation companies can sell more flights while improving general crew satisfaction.