Proceedings of the 2005 Winter Simulation

We present a specification of the optimization of KLM’s flight schedule in this paper using object-oriented simulation services on top of the Java-based distributed simulation environment DSOL. The paper shows the added value of a service-based architecture for linking the simulation of KLM’s operations, the operational modules for day-to-day flight optimization, the interfaces to input data, and the output visualization tools. All services are loosely coupled to the other services. The contracts as defined in the interfaces of the services allow for easy extensions of the functionality of for instance the optimization modules, without the need for making changes in other places of the model. Links to external data sources can also be easily provided. In the project, it was clearly demonstrated that the usefulness, usability, and usage of the distributed, service-based architecture for KLM is much higher than earlier implementations of their simulation-based optimization models.