Bidding

What happens when a senior bidder changes their bid at the last minute?

There is obviously some domino effect when a senior bidder changes their preferences. He will be awarded new trips, but the former trips now become available. These trips can have both positive and negative impact to the lineholders below him.

As a general rule, the most desired trips will never fall too far junior, and as those trips become available they will go to senior people.

Because of the high visibility of the system, most trips will naturally find their seniority level fairly quickly.

A key point to remember is that all bidders should have a deep enough bid to cover their desires. In a worst case where all your first choices are taken, secondary and more generic choices will protect you. Once you learn to bid to deep enough to cover your relative seniority, if senior bidders change their lines there will be no deleterious effects on your line, and you now have the advantage of being able  to see the effect and react to it if need be.

Line Builder

What makes SmartPref so fast?

SmartPref was designed from the ground up for speed. No compromises had to be made to support backward compatibility. It uses a greedy heuristic algorithm to build its solutions.

How is it possible to produce good results at such speeds?

A core tenant of our program is the belief in crew-driven optimization. This means that by giving crewmembers immediate feedback about how their preferences will play out, they are able to achieve far greater satisfaction than with conventional blind bidding in PBSs. Users of our system will be able to enter better input than they could with any other PBS system. Their choice being based on actual availability means that the line they are bidding is a feasible alternative. This means that our solution converges quickly as it honors crew preferences while ensuring proper utilization. Instead of spending several hours or days optimizing the solution at the close of a bid period, SmartPref takes advantage of the crewmembers realistic choices to produce an 'optimized' solution.

Another feature of the program is it's ability to gauge quickly and accurately when a critical level is reached; that is the point where choices can no longer be awarded because of the need to satisfy global constraints. Until that point is reached however, the award process based on the bidding described above is extremely fast. Typical critical levels are not proportional to problem size, a crew size of 80 may reach criticality at bidder 40 or at the 50% mark, whereas a crew size of 800 may reach criticality at bidder 640 or at the 80% mark. This accounts for Crewing Solutions ability to deal very effectively with large problem sizes.

Have Other Questions?

Email us at
questions@crewingsolutions.com.